knife.51 A cult developed, moreover, not only around this eucharistic wafer, which allegedly miraculously bled, but also around the “holy knife” with which it was stabbed.52
Crucial to the compellingness of the Norwich circumcision case as an anti-Jewish narrative was its resolution in favor of Christians and the Christian faith. According to the summary of the proceedings, this resolution began when Edward escaped “from the hands of the Jews” shortly after his circumcision, and Matilda de Bernham discovered him sobbing by the river.53 In this scene, Edward’s tears, the river, and Matilda’s kindness may be read as standard tropes. To be sure, it would have made sense for a traumatized boy to be crying at this point, and it is entirely plausible that Edward might have walked by the river Wensum. The symbolism of water as representing purification and renewal, however, seems apt, as well. Water’s cleansing and transformative properties figured frequently in contemporaneous literature. For instance, In a story in the annals of Egmond Abbey in the county of Holland, a Jewish father—the cruel adult male Jew of Christian lore—drowned his son in the Danube to prevent his baptism. Although this boy’s body had been weighted with lead, the river lifted it up and gently washed it ashore, shining. In the meantime, the water cured the blindness of a female onlooker, evoking how this boy’s mystical passage from Judaism to Christianity entailed a restoration of sight.54 Similarly, both Edward’s tears and the river that flowed by him may be read as representing a salvific cleansing, perhaps even a rebaptism.55
For her part, Matilda de Bernham also played roles familiar from tales of ritual murder and host desecration. First, like the pious Christian women in such narratives, she served as a detector of Jewish abuse.56 Second, as a maternal figure, she evoked the Virgin Mary, who figured prominently in contemporaneous anti-Jewish literature.57 The summary of the legal proceedings stressed that Matilda was a mother. She discovered Edward together with her daughter, and she came before the justices at Norwich “with her daughter similarly under oath.” Furthermore, Matilda acted maternally toward Edward. According to the summary, Matilda testified that she and her daughter “kept [Edward] in their home for the love of God because they did not know whose son he was.”58 Matilda’s solicitousness toward Edward further accentuates the pathos of the account, highlighting the absence of Edward’s own mother from the records of the proceedings—an absence that is analyzed in Chapter 5.
Finally, the summary of the legal proceedings mirrored the narrative arc of contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales by stressing that Norwich Christians defeated the Jews. Although the document was composed in 1235, before the case entered its final stages in ecclesiastical court, its closing words made clear that the Jews had begun to endure their deserved punishment: They “remain[ed] in prison.”59
In short, the summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case was inscribed with thematic and structural features common to contemporaneous anti-Jewish literature. Like myriad tales from its cultural milieu, this record cast Jewish men as harming a Christian boy out of contempt for Christianity and receiving their just deserts. Additional familiar topoi included the innocent child victim who was initially at play, the child as truth-teller, Jewish blindness, the purifying and regenerative power of water, and the intervention of a pious Christian woman who evoked the Virgin Mary. Presenting a more or less stock narrative, the summary of the legal proceedings illustrates how the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could assume the same form as contemporaneous tales about other alleged expressions of Jewish iniquity. Possibly, the legal nature of the summary of the proceedings bolstered its perceived credibility. This document’s conformity to and reiteration of ingrained anti-Jewish myths, however, likely also made it convincing. To quote Anthony Bale, “When ‘fantasy’ proliferates and eclipses ‘truth,’ the fantasy is more real, more true, than reality.”60
Circumcision as Prelude to Crucifixion
The Norwich circumcision case was retold in five thirteenth-century chronicles. The Chronicle of Bury St. Edmunds and the second continuation of the Chronicle of Florence of Worcester both stated simply that, In 1240, “at Norwich, four Jews were drawn by horses and hanged on account of various crimes [but] especially because they circumcised a certain Christian boy according to the rite of the Jews.”61 Between about 1236 and 1253, Roger Wendover and his successor at St. Albans Abbey, Matthew Paris, recorded a strikingly different account.62 Preserved in the entry for the year 1235 in Wendover’s Flores historiarum (Flowers of History)—as well as in the entries for the year 1235 in Paris’s Chronica majora and Historia Anglorum—the short version of this account stated that “seven Jews, who had circumcised a certain boy at Norwich, whom they had secretly stolen away, and whom they had hidden from the sight of Christians for a year, wanting to crucify him at Easter, were brought before the king at Westminster.” The Jews confessed their crimes and were found guilty and imprisoned.63 The longer version, which is found in Paris’s entry for the year 1240 in his Chronica majora, Is more detailed. It mentions that the Jews renamed Edward. It claims that Edward’s father searched for him. It describes Edward’s eventual reunion with his father, and it explains the case’s final adjudication by ecclesiastical authorities. According to this account:
Jews circumcised a Christian boy in Norwich. Having circumcised him, they named him Jurnin. They kept him, however, In order to crucify him as an insult to Jesus Christ crucified. The father of the boy, however, from whom the Jews had secretly stolen the boy, having diligently searched for his son, found him confined in the Jews’ custody. With jubilant cries, he pointed to his son, whom he thought he had lost, who was wickedly confined in a certain Jewish chamber. When so great a crime came to the attention of Bishop William of Raleigh, a prudent and circumspect man, and some other nobles, all the Jews of that town were seized, lest, through the neglect of Christians, so great an injury to Christ should go unpunished. And when [the Jews] wanted to place themselves under the protection of royal authority, the bishop said: “These matters regard the church. They are not to be dealt with by the royal curia, as this case concerns circumcision and the wounding of the faith.” Four of the Jews were found guilty of the aforesaid crime. First, they were dragged by the tails of horses, and then they were hanged by the gallows, where they exhaled the wretched remains of life.64
Like the narrative that emerges from the summary of the legal proceedings, Wendover’s and Paris’s short and long versions of the Norwich circumcision case—on whose commonalities the following pages focus—had all the elements of a typical anti-Jewish tale. They cast malevolent Jewish men as preying on a helpless Christian child and being punished. Unlike the summary of the legal proceedings, however, these chronicle accounts did not present Norwich Jews as intent on bringing Edward into the Jewish community. Instead, they claimed that Norwich Jews circumcised Edward with the intention of crucifying him at Easter. In other words, they recast Edward’s circumcision as a prelude to—or a first step in—an attempted ritual murder. This interweaving of circumcision and crucifixion into a single anti-Jewish story was unprecedented, and it provides fresh insight into contemporaneous Christian views of circumcision and Jewish proselytizing.
To modern sensibilities, the notion that Jews would circumcise a child whom they intended to murder is puzzling. Why would Jews perform a rite that they typically performed on their own infants to welcome them into the Jewish community on Christian children whom they allegedly wanted to kill? As the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jewish scholar Menasseh ben Israel pointed out in his refutation of Wendover and Paris’s narrative in his Vindiciae judaeorum (Vindication of the Jews), from a Jewish perspective, circumcision and murder were antithetical. Jewish circumcision was “a testimony of great love and affection,” he explained, “and [Jews presumably would] not dare make a sport of one of the seals of their covenant.” Menasseh ben Israel concluded that the whole Norwich story was a “prank” and that Norwich Jews’ imputed deeds were in fact worthy of Spanish Catholics in the Americas “who first baptized the poor Indians, and afterwards … inhumanely butchered them.”65
Wendover
