no longer bear the harshness and rigor of [their] order.”41 Regardless of the accuracy of Gerald’s claims, Gerald’s decision to illustrate alleged Cistercian degeneracy by contending that two Cistercians abandoned Christianity for Judaism is significant. It shows that some early thirteenth-century Christian intellectuals were beginning to contemplate the phenomenon of Christian apostasy to Judaism and that they regarded it as reprehensible in the extreme.
Roughly contemporaneous chronicles related another alleged instance of Christian apostasy to Judaism in the British Isles—that of the deacon who was degraded and sentenced at the 1222 Council of Oxford. In this case, too, Christian authors contended that lust drove apostasy. Purportedly, this deacon “was circumcised for the love of a Jewish woman.”42 Early thirteenth-century accounts alluded merely in passing to this Jewish love interest. In the 1250s, however, Matthew Paris cast this woman as a formidable temptress, thereby placing the blame for this deacon’s apostasy squarely on a Jew. According to Paris, this Jewish woman declared to the lovelorn deacon, who “ardently pined” for her “embrace”: “‘I will do what you ask … if you apostatize, have yourself circumcised, and faithfully adhere to Judaism.’”43 Specifying that this Jewish woman demanded that the deacon “faithfully adhere to Judaism,” Paris implied that this affair involved a formal conversion—or at least an attempted formal conversion—to Judaism, as opposed to a circumcision that was undertaken independent of a communal Jewish framework. It is not known whether Jewish authorities in fact sanctioned and supervised this deacon’s alleged conversion. No Jews are known to have been punished in relation to this case. It is well attested, however, that the Oxford Council turned this deacon over to the sheriff’s officers for execution. According to several chronicles, the deacon was burned; according to Paris’s Chronica majora (Great Chronicle), he was hanged; according to Paris’s Historia Anglorum (History of the English), he was beheaded. Whatever its means, this execution constituted the first known case of the death penalty being exacted for religious deviance in England.44
During the 1230s—the decade during which the Norwich circumcision case unfolded—for the first time in centuries, claims about people who were not slaves, who had been born into Christian families, and who apostatized to Judaism began to surface in papal and episcopal correspondence. On March 5, 1233, for instance, in the bull Sufficere debuerat (which is referred to, like all papal bulls, by the initial words of the official Latin text), addressed to archbishops, bishops, and other prelates in German lands, Pope Gregory IX reported “with sorrow and shame” that he had heard about three sets of circumstances under which Christians were apostatizing to Judaism. First, Jews owned Christian slaves whom they circumcised and forced to “Judaize.” Second, Gregory continued, “some people, who were Christians not in deed but only in name, were going over to the Jews willingly and, pursuing their rite, they allowed themselves to be circumcised and publicly declared themselves to be Jews.” Third, Jews who—in contravention of the Third Council of Toledo (589) and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)—had been granted “secular dignities and public offices” were “venting their anger against Christians” and “making some [Christians] keep their [Jewish] rite.”45 In short, according to Gregory, some Christians were apostatizing to Judaism of their own accord. In addition, in contexts in which Jews wielded power over Christians, Jews were causing Christians to convert to Judaism.
Three months later, on May 18, 1233, Gregory called on the archbishop of Compostela to compel King Ferdinand III of Leon and Castile to address a roster of Jewish offenses that, he said, “it would [have] be[en] not only improper but inhuman for the faithful of Christ to tolerate.” In terms nearly identical to those that he had employed in his March bull to German prelates, Gregory claimed that he had heard that, among other things, Jews in Spain who had been granted “secular dignities and public offices” were “venting their anger against Christians” and “making some [Christians] keep their [Jewish] rite.”46 In the same year, in his tractate against the Albigensians, the Leonese bishop Lucas of Tuy—who must have been familiar with Gregory’s missive to the archbishop of nearby Compostela—accused Jews of bribing Christian officials to join their ranks. He claimed that “the malignant Jews” not only blasphemed against Christianity but also “led [Christian] magistrates to their own [Jewish] worship by means of gold.”47
During the middle decades of the thirteenth century, three major Castilian law codes addressed Christian apostasy to Judaism and alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism. The first, the Fuero juzgo (Forum of the Judges), was a Castilian translation and adaptation of the Latin Visigothic Forum judicum (Forum of the Judges), which King Ferdinand III—to whom Pope Gregory IX had written—assigned to Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and other towns in Andalusia and Murcia as their municipal charter. The Fuero juzgo stipulated that “a Christian of either sex, and especially one born of Christian parents, who practiced circumcision or any other Jewish rite should be put to an ignominious death … and all of his property should be confiscated for the benefit of the royal treasury.”48 In addition, the Fuero juzgo stated that men who circumcised Christians or Jews were to have their penises amputated and their possessions confiscated. Women who performed circumcisions or brought their sons to be circumcised were to have their noses cut off, suffer a financial penalty, and be exiled for the rest of their lives. Anyone who “carried Christian men or women away from the faith of Christ and turned them toward Jewish disbelief and error” was to receive the same penalties as a circumciser.49 These provisions contravened established norms of Christian toleration of Jews and Judaism in thirteenth-century Castile, and there is no evidence that they were enforced. However, the translation and dissemination of these laws during the thirteenth century suggest at least heightened Christian awareness that Jews had the potential to draw Christians to Judaism and circumcise them.50
Two other Castilian law codes may have reflected contemporaneous concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism, although they often echoed Roman and Visigothic material. Redacted between 1256 and 1265 and promulgated in 1348, the Siete partidas (Seven Divisions) of King Alfonso X (d. 1284) included a section on Jews that thrice addressed Christian apostasy to Judaism. Law 10 of this section focused on slave conversion. Law 2 threatened the death penalty and confiscation of goods for Jews who preached to or converted a Christian to Judaism “by praising the law of the Jews and deprecating the law of the Christians.”51 Law 7 stipulated that Christian apostates to Judaism were to be put to death and their possessions were to be confiscated.52 Redacted between 1252 and 1255 by the circle of Alfonso X as a template for municipal law codes, the Fuero real (Royal Forum) addressed Christian apostasy to Judaism in the second of its seven laws on Jews. The Fuero real forbade “any Jew to induce any Christian to turn away from his law [i.e., Christianity] or circumcise him” on pain of death and confiscation of goods.53 In 1255 and 1256, Alfonso assigned the Fuero real to the towns of Sahagún, Aguilar de Campoo, Palencia, and Burgos.54
In sum, during the second and third decades of the thirteenth century, chroniclers, popes, kings, jurists, and others in the British Isles, German lands, Leon, and Castile began to express concern about Christian apostasy to Judaism. They penned accounts of alleged cases of apostasy, voiced outrage at rumors that Christians were going over to Judaism, and publicized penalties for apostates to Judaism and their Jewish abettors. In so doing, they depicted Christian apostasy to Judaism sometimes as voluntary and sometimes as the result of sinister Jewish machinations. They contended that Jewish men and women drew Christians to Judaism by taking advantage of Christian lust and greed, abusing the power that they sometimes wielded over Christians, and employing rhetorical skill.
The Instability of Christian Identity
Burgeoning thirteenth-century concerns about apostasy to Judaism were inextricably tied to broader ecclesiastical preoccupations with the instability of Christian identity. During the thirteenth century, ecclesiastical alarm about Christian deviance reached new heights. Determined to root out Christian groups that turned their backs on the church hierarchy and its teachings, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29), which
