Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe -- Boundaries Real and Imagined

JEWS AND APOSTATES IN MEDIEVALEUROPE — BOUNDARIES REAL

AND IMAGINED

The chief trauma in the historical memory of the Jews of Franco-Germany (‘Ashkenaz’) in the Middle Ages was the persecution of1096, when thousands of crusaders slaughtered the Jews in townsalong the Rhine. The particulars of this grim episode are detailedin three twelfth-century Hebrew texts, which emphasize theexperience of the Jewish martyrs, allegedly about two thousandin Worms and Mainz alone. The main event in these tales ofcarnage is the slaughter of Jews by Jews: parents killed their chil-dren, each other and themselves when the enemy was at the door,and there was no escape. The narratives do make fleeting mentionof those Jews who survived by accepting baptism, but that is notprimarily what these Hebrew accounts are about.

The historical record of the First Crusade persecutions, andthe mass martyrdom in particular, became the hallmark ofAshkenazic Jewry in modern historiography. Yitzhak Baer, oneof the most influential scholars of Jewish history, called theFranco-German diaspora ‘the purest embodiment of the peopleof God’, and added that ‘the rule of the Torah, in theory andpractice, was manifested there to the utmost degree’.1 For Baer,the voluntary martyrdom of Ashkenazic Jewry in 1096 testified tothe purity of their faith, and this mindset held sway for most of thetwentieth century. The memory of the First Crusade has reso-nated so powerfully in modern Jewish historiography, in largemeasure because it contrasts starkly with the historical memoryof the other great diaspora, Iberian Jewry (‘Sepharad’). Herethe salient image is the conversion of thousands of Jews in thefifteenth century, especially in the wake of the Tortosa Dispu-tation of 1412–14. Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry have thusbeen placed in opposition, with the former marked as faithfulowing to their heroic self-sacrifice in 1096, and the latter asweak-kneed because of their large-scale apostasy.

1 Yitzhak Baer, Galut, trans. Robert Warshow (New York, 1947), 48–9. I havedeviated a little from the published English translation. Cf. the Hebrew edition(Jerusalem, 1980), 44.

Past and Present, no. 194 (Feb. 2007) � The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtl024

To understand the different responses to religious confronta-tion in the two realms, modern scholars have focused on theintensity of the cultural interaction with the Christian environ-ment. The Jews of Spain are known to have been deeply inte-grated into the overall political, economic and social structure.They were also highly acculturated, with the relatively affluentacquiring a broad general education in addition to the traditionalJewish curriculum, and exhibiting cultural tastes similar to thoseof their Gentile neighbours. In contrast, the Jews of medievalAshkenaz are usually depicted as having shared neither of thesecharacteristics, and for many historians their social and culturalinsularity was the key to their steadfastness in 1096.

Historians have recently begun to question the reliability of theHebrew First Crusade narratives, and to suggest that the apos-tates were more numerous and apostasy less atypical of the 1096experience than was once thought.2 If true, this new perspective isof singular importance, because it undermines the Ashkenaz–Sepharad dichotomy: one can no longer reduce the medievalexperience to a binary structure of cultural engagement versusinsularity. Deliberation between these two options has character-ized the internal debate over Jewish identity throughout Jewishhistory. The Old Testament is replete with warnings about thedangers of fraternizing with idolatrous neighbours, while in LateAntiquity the following talmudic dictum succinctly expressesa positive attitude towards cultural engagement: ‘He found apomegranate, ate its contents and disposed of its peel’.3 TheMaimonidean Controversy, which erupted in Maimonides’ life-time and repeatedly thereafter through the ages, surrounded thissame dilemma.

For modern historians, beginning with the nineteenth-centurydevotees of the ‘Science of Judaism’ (Wissenschaft des Judentums),

2 See Kenneth Stow, ‘Conversion, Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness: Emicho ofFlonheim and the Fear of Jews in the Twelfth Century’, Speculum, lxxvi (2001),933. Yet Stow goes too far when he writes: ‘All of the chronicles . . . stress the frequencyof conversion’, and ‘the Hebrew chronicles are concerned as much with conversion toChristianity and return to Judaism as they are with Kiddush HaShem’ (ibid., 923,925). See also Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and JewishMemories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, 2004), 58; Simon Schwarzfuchs, ‘ThePlace of the Crusades in Jewish History’ [in Hebrew], in Menahem Ben-Sasson,Robert Bonfil and Joseph R. Hacker (eds.), Culture and Society in Medieval Jewry[in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1989), 251–67.

3 Hagigah, 15b. This issue is at the heart of the most recent survey of Jewish history:David Biale (ed.), Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002).

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Sephardic acculturation embodied the strategy they hoped wouldgrant Jews an entree into European society; whereas AshkenazicJewry appeared benighted and isolated, and thus presented acounter-model. A shift began in the 1920s and 1930s, with lead-ing historians such as Baer taking a dim view of Sephardic world-liness and apostasy, and hailing Ashkenazic insularity andfortitude. The shift probably represents the decline, followingthe First World War, in the European belief in rationalism andprogress, and the greater appreciation of religious spirituality andmysticism. Subsequently, the destruction of European Jewryduring the Second World War and the ongoing struggle of theZionist enterprise reinforced the image of Jew–Gentile relationsas competitive and tense, and buttressed the heroic image of theJews of medieval Ashkenaz. But, a generation after the great crisesof the mid twentieth century, Baer and his contemporaries havingdeparted the scene, scholars have now begun to investigate thesensitive issue of medieval acculturation and insularity, with theircorresponding Ashkenazic and Sephardic paradigms.

What, specifically, was the image of apostates and apostasy inmedieval Ashkenaz? Here, the standard account would have usbelieve, Jews rarely apostatized, and then only under extremeduress; and they reverted at the earliest opportunity. Portrayalsof the medieval Jewish community play down the presence ofrenegades, who drop out of the annals of Jewish history asthough they ceased to exist. The aetiology of apostasy, too, hassupported the heroic image of this collective. Apostasy allegedlyrepresents the failure of medieval Jews to stand up to the conver-sionary pressures of their environment, be they economic, socialor psychological. From this perspective, such forces surroundedand bombarded the Jews every day, and they stood in perpetualneed of effective means with which to fend off the cultural aggres-sion of their predatory neighbours. The interaction between Jewand Christian in medieval Ashkenaz was an eternal Kulturkampf,in which apostates represent instances of the Jews’ defeat in reli-gious warfare.

The present study proposes a less idealized image. It is stillunclear how numerous apostates were during the first quarterof the second millennium, but coerced apostates did not neces-sarily outnumber voluntary ones, and the distinction was gener-ally unimportant to medieval rabbis. Even coerced apostates didnot always revert, or did not necessarily do so promptly, and there

JEWS AND APOSTATES IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE 5

were also those who converted, reverted and converted again,sometimes going through the cycle more than once. Apostatesdid not vanish, but were, rather, a fixture of medieval Jewish soci-ety with whom members of the Jewish community interactedfreely and often without ill will. Finally, while there were thosewho apostatized because they became convinced of the truth ofChristianity, there were also those whose apostasy was venal.These apostates hurdled the Jewish–Christian divide with ease,as if they did not consider it terribly significant.

Taken together, these elements present an alternative image ofapostasy, and by extension of the character of the Jewish commu-nity and the nature of Jewish–Christian relations in medievalEurope. For the image of Jews and Christians separated by anenormous spiritual and cultural gulf and locked into a state ofunremitting confrontation and hostility, we substitute one ofunrestricted social and cultural intercourse, with the two commu-nities separated by a low barrier of beliefs and taboos. Of course,both these pictures of Jewish–Christian relations are caricatures,with the truth at any given juncture lying somewhere between thetwo poles.

The time frame of the following inquiry is limited to the firstquarter of the second millennium CE. The early portion of thisperiod was the formative one for Ashkenazic Jewry. I am lessconfident with regard to the later portion, but there does seemto be a shift in the middle of the thirteenth century towards anatmosphere of greater tension between the two faiths. The thir-teenth century witnessed a number of new, distressing develop-ments, including the discriminatory measures of the FourthLateran Council, the burning of the Talmud, and the Host dese-cration libel. For German Jewry, the Rindfleisch massacres endedthe thirteenth century on a particularly grim note, and the Frenchexpulsion of 1306 (following the English expulsion of 1290) sig-nalled the end of a long period of prosperity and cultural achieve-ment. Various explanations for such a shift can be and have beenadduced, but our concern is with the reputed heroism ofAshkenazic Jewry, which relates primarily to the period inquestion.

Rabbinic literature is the primary corpus of source materials forthe study of Ashkenazic Jewry in the eleventh to thirteenth cen-turies. This literature consists mainly of commentaries on biblicaland talmudic literature, liturgical poetry, legal manuals and


responsa. As historical sources, these genres are problematic, forthey deal mostly with timeless concerns, rather than with prob-lems of the moment. Yet the distinction between timeless andtime-bound issues is not absolute. For instance, although responsaare responses to queries on matters of Jewish law, this type ofdocument is largely an elucidation of the relevant legal considera-tions, as aired in talmudic literature, with meagre references tocurrent norms of thought and practice. On the other hand, theTosafot, an extensive corpus of glosses on the Babylonian Talmudcomposed in precisely the time and place of interest here, referfairly frequently to contemporary conditions.

These works were authored by the leading rabbis of the day, thethree most prominent of whom are Gershom ben Judah of Mainz,known as Rabbenu (‘Our Rabbi’) Gershom (d. 1028), Solomonben Isaac of Troyes, usually called Rashi (d. 1105), and Jacob benMeir of Ramerupt, commonly referred to as Rabbenu Tam(d. 1171). These scholars, their colleagues and disciples taughtin academies, which were located in the Rhineland in the eleventhcentury, primarily in Mainz and Worms, and thereafter in andaround Paris. Unlike the schoolmen of the universities, the rabbisengaged in the same economic pursuits as other Jews, and theirauthority depended on their reputation for erudition and acuity,rather than on any socio-economic distinctions between them-selves and their brethren.

I

NUMBERS

The heroic image of Ashkenazic Jewry has numerous elements,including the assumption that apostates were few. This notion,like the other components, rests on medieval sources. Agobard ofLyon, the nemesis of Narbonese Jewry in the early ninth century,complains that ‘in spite of all the humanity and kindness we dis-play towards them, we do not succeed in bringing over one ofthem to our faith’.4 In the twelfth century, Guibert of Nogent

4 Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et chretiens dans le monde occidental, 430–1096 (Paris,1960), 138.


admits that the sincere, ideological conversion of a Jew ‘in ourdays is unusual’.5

How common was apostasy in Franco-Germany during thehigh Middle Ages? Historians usually concede that it is difficultto tell,6 but they often convey the assumption that the incidence innorthern Europe was lower than elsewhere. To illustrate this, SaloBaron writes: ‘Even among steadfast German Jewry, apostatesare mentioned from time to time’,7 implicitly underscoring thesupreme devotion and fidelity of Ashkenazic Jewry. Elsewhere,too, Baron states that ‘such conversions [i.e. ideological] mustoften have taken place even in the more staunchly orthodox com-munities of northern France and Germany, and many more in theMediterranean countries’.8 Here again, Baron concedes thatapostasy was not a totally negligible social phenomenon inAshkenaz, but he still views the Jews of northern Europe asmore steadfast than those of other regions.

A barometer of the numbers issue is the following remark,attributed to Rabbenu Tam: ‘More than twenty bills of divorceinvolving apostates were executed in Paris and [Ile-de-] France’.9

Jacob Katz interprets this text to refer to isolated instances ofapostasy, rather than to a single large group, but draws no con-clusions about the overall scale of the problem.10 The difficulty isthat Rabbenu Tam’s statement does not present a time frame, andit is therefore impossible to know whether the incident he relateswas common, rare or possibly unique. Avraham Grossman, onthe other hand, maintains that apostasy was a big problem in thetwelfth century. Twenty, he explains, reflects a widespread phe-nomenon, when we take into consideration the minuscule size ofEuropean Jewry in the twelfth century, which generally num-bered a few dozen families. He also observes that there wereundoubtedly some apostates who did not write bills of divorce,

5 Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (1064?–c.1125), trans. C. C. Swinton Bland, ed. John F. Benton (New York, 1970), 137. For asimilar observation by Bishop Stephen of Tournai, see Salo W. Baron, A Social andReligious History of the Jews, 2nd edn, 18 vols. (New York, 1952–83), ix, 22–3.

6 Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish–Gentile Relations inMedieval and Modern Times (Oxford, 1961), 67–8.

7 Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, ix, 22–3.8 Ibid., v, 113.9 Jacob ben Meir Tam, Sefer ha-Yashar [Book of the Upright], ed. Sheraga Faish

Rozenthal (Berlin, 1898), 45, x25.10 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 67.


whether because they were unmarried, because their wivesconverted with them, or because they simply chose not toco-operate.11

Rabbenu Tam goes on to relate that ‘it happens every day’ thatapostates divorce their Jewish wives. This phrase, even if it is anexaggeration, appears to settle the matter in favour of frequentcrossover between the Jewish and Christian communities.Curiously, however, the remark has gone unnoticed in scholarlydiscussions, which seems to reflect prior assumptions about theextremely modest scope of apostasy in medieval Ashkenazic soci-ety. And even if apostasy was not something that ‘happens everyday’, the volume of legal sources on the apostate’s power to inheritseems to indicate that it was an important problem, and onewhich could not have been altogether uncommon. Both the1084 charter of Speyer and that issued by Henry IV in 1090 pro-hibit apostates from inheriting their parents’ estate.12 Clearly thisclause was drawn up at the behest of the Jewish constituency,which might have insisted upon it even if apostates were few.However, the issue was also of concern to the Church, as is evi-denced by the inclusion among the decrees of the Third LateranCouncil of one that allows Jewish converts to inherit.13

The view that apostasy was rare has given way in the past gen-eration to greater recognition of its presence in, and significance

11 Avraham Grossman, ‘The Roots of Kiddush Hashem in Early Ashkenaz’ [inHebrew], in Isaiah M. Gafni and Aviezer Ravitzky (eds.), Sanctity of Life andMartyrdom [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1992), 125; Avraham Grossman, The EarlySages of France: Their Lives, Leadership and Works [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1995), 503.

12 Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im frankischen und deutschenReiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1902), 73, x170; Baron, Social and ReligiousHistory of the Jews, ix, 20. The rule regarding inheritance was retained in subsequentimperial legislation, though it continued to provoke ecclesiastical condemnation: seeFriedrich Lotter, ‘Imperial versus Ecclesiastical Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages:Contradictions and Controversies Concerning the Conversion of Jews and theirSerfs’, in David Assaf (ed.), Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies,Jerusalem, August 16–24, 1989, vol. B/2 (Jerusalem, 1990), 59–60; Friedrich Lotter,‘The Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages’, JewishHist., iv (1989), 40–1.

13 Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, 2nd edn(New York, 1966), 296; Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, ix, 19; SaloW. Baron, The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution, 3vols. (Philadelphia, 1942), i, 247–8. It has been suggested that this developmentregarding inheritance led rabbinic decisors to permit apostates to inherit their parents’estate, contrary to the traditional view: see Simhah Goldin, Uniqueness andTogetherness: The Enigma of the Survival of the Jews in the Middle Ages [in Hebrew](Tel Aviv, 1997), 93.


for, medieval Jewish life. However, the impact of this shift for theheroic image of Ashkenazic Jewry has been blunted in two ways:by maintaining that it compared favourably with that of Spain;and by classifying the Franco-German apostates as predomin-antly the victims of coerced baptism.

II

COERCION

A second component in the mythical depiction of AshkenazicJewry is that its (few) apostates were almost all forcibly baptized,rather than being true converts to Christianity. Once again, SaloBaron illustrates this mode of discourse: ‘Whatever the cumula-tive effects of voluntary baptisms may have been, they wereindubitably far surpassed numerically by those of massCatholicization under duress, especially during massacres andexpulsions’.14 This generalization makes room for apostasy with-out compromising the image of Ashkenazic fidelity.

The distinction between voluntary and forced conversionseems important, and yet, remarkably, medieval sources tend tosoft-pedal this issue.15 For example, medieval Hebrew has twoterms for apostate, mumar and meshumad, and some historianshave suggested that the former was used to refer to voluntaryapostates, the latter to those who were coerced.16 Yet the twoterms appear interchangeably in the writing of the rabbinic lead-ership of Franco-German Jewry in the tenth to twelfth centuries,and are not used to distinguish between the two types of apos-tasy.17 The rarity with which medieval European rabbis address

14 Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, ix, 23.15 Cf. Ephraim Kanarfogel’s contention that ‘halakhists had to consider the inten-

tion . . . of the apostate’, in his ‘Rabbinic Attitudes toward Nonobservance in theMedieval Period’, in Jacob J. Schacter (ed.), Jewish Tradition and the NontraditionalJew (Northvale, NJ, 1992), 3.

16 Solomon Zeitlin, ‘Mummar and Meshumad’, Jewish Quart. Rev., liv (1963),84–6; Saul Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-fshutah: A Comprehensive Commentary on theTosefta, pt 3, 2nd edn (Jerusalem, 1992), 402 n. 45. Cf. John M. G. Barclay, ‘WhoWas Considered an Apostate in the Jewish Diaspora?’, in Graham N. Stanton and GuyG. Stroumsa (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity(Cambridge, 1998). On the origins of the term meshumad, see also Moshe benYa6akov ibn Ezra, Kitab al-Muhadara wal-Mudhakara [Judaeo-Arabic], ed. andHebrew trans. A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem, 1975), 48–9. My thanks to Daniel Frank ofthe Ohio State University for this reference.

17 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 68 n. 6; and cf. the view of Simhah Goldin in hisUniqueness and Togetherness, 89–90.


this distinction catches the modern reader by surprise and high-lights its anachronistic and tendentious nature.

The classic example of the conflation of coerced and voluntaryapostasy is the case of the son of Gershom of Mainz, the spiritualand communal leader of German Jewry in the tenth century.Modern scholars could not imagine that the apostasy of thisman’s son could have been anything but coerced, and so, begin-ning with Heinrich Graetz, they attached the story of Gershom’sson to the persecution of Mainz Jewry in 1012. Most narratives ofthis episode report the quick reversion of the forced apostates ofMainz and note that Gershom’s son died before he was able torevert. This circumstance, they posit, explains the tradition thatRabbenu Gershom observed a fourteen-day period of mourningfor his son, rather than the seven days mandated by Jewishtradition.18

A closer look at the sources concerning the mourning observedby Gershom illustrates the manipulation of this story by medievalrabbis and thus also later by modern historians. Isaac ben Mosesof Vienna (d. c.1250), the earliest source, states the rule that oneshould not mourn villains who died unrepentant, but then addsthe following caveat: ‘However, in times of destruction,19 I heardfrom my teacher, Rabbi Samson [of Coucy], that Gershommourned for fourteen days for his son that apostatized’.20 Isaacdoes not impute to his teacher the assumption that Gershom’schild was forcibly converted; Samson merely reports the apostasy

18 Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den altesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart,4th edn, 11 vols. (Leipzig, 1870–97), v, 337–9, 472–4 (n. 22). Shlomo Eidelbergrejects the possibility that Gershom’s son apostatized during the 1012 persecutionon the grounds that he could not possibly have preferred apostasy to banishment,which was the available alternative. See Gershom ben Judah, Responsa, ed. ShlomoEidelberg (New York, 1956), 11. For another critique of Graetz’s reconstruction, seeH. Tykocinski, ‘Die Verfolgung der Juden in Mainz im Jahre 1012’, in Beitrage zurGeschichte der deutschen Juden: Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage Martin Philippsons(Leipzig, 1916), 2–3. On the Mainz persecution, see also Avigdor Aptowitzer,Introduction to Sefer Rabiah [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1938), 331; James Parkes, TheJew in the Medieval Community: A Study of his Political and Economic Situation (London,1938), 38; Avraham Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadershipand Works (900–1096) [in Hebrew], 3rd edn (Jerusalem, 2001), 90, 112; Grossman,‘Roots of Kiddush Hashem’, 125; Grossman, Early Sages of France, 502; David Malkiel,‘Jewish–Christian Relations in Europe, 840–1096: A Historiographical Review’,Jl Medieval Hist., xxix (2003), 79–80.

19 i.e. shemad, which can refer to physical or spiritual destruction, namely apostasy.20 Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, Or Zaru6a [Sown Light] (Zhitomir, 1862), pt 2, 88c,

x428.


and Gershom’s extended period of mourning. It is Isaac who fillsin the blanks with the phrase ‘in times of destruction’, and pre-sents the apostasy as involuntary.

Later authorities are more cautious. Meir ben Barukh ofRothenburg (d. 1293) writes: ‘I heard from Isaac of Vienna thatGershom mourned for his son that apostatized, but he told methat one ought not to learn from this, for he [Gershom] did soout of an excess of sorrow, since he [the son] did not merit [theopportunity] to repent’.21 Here Isaac reports the fact of the apos-tasy without stating whether it was coerced or voluntary. Thefinal clause contains the germ of the notion that Gershom’s sonwould have reverted if he had lived. Yet this interpretation is un-warranted, for saying that an apostate ‘did not merit [the oppor-tunity] to repent’ does not relate to a particular individual, or tothe circumstances of his apostasy, but merely assumes that giventhe opportunity, anyone in his right mind would revert.22

The absence of a distinction in medieval texts between coercedand voluntary apostasy also emerges from a ban attributed toGershom, which threatens with excommunication anyonereminding a reverted apostate of his sin. The ban reads: ‘Not toshame the penitent ones [by] mentioning their sin’, with no quali-fying phrase to apply this rule exclusively to victims of forcedbaptism.23 A variant reads: ‘Not to shame a coerced person anda penitent one by mentioning his sin to him in any way’.24 Herecoercion is mentioned, although it is unclear whether the decreerefers exclusively to reverted victims of forcible baptism orperhaps also to penitent voluntary apostates.25

(cont. on p. 13)

21 Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg, The Complete Laws of Mourning [in Hebrew], ed.Akiva Dov Landau and Jacob Aaron Landau (Jerusalem, 1976), 58, x37. See also Meirben Barukh of Rothenburg, Responsa (Prague, 1608), no. 544; Mordecai ben Hillel (d.1298) on Mo6ed Qattan, x937.

22 Meir ben Barukh’s signature does not appear at the conclusion of this text, andthus its attribution to him is uncertain.

23 Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (New York,1964), 30–1. Finkelstein notes the absence of a distinction between voluntary andcoerced apostates.

24 Ibid., 126. Finkelstein infers from the existence of such a rabbinical decree thatapostasy was rampant in the early eleventh century. Grossman concludes, more con-servatively, that reminding penitent apostates of their mistake was a common practice,which created severe tensions within the Jewish community: Grossman, Early Sages ofFrance, 152. Neither of these claims can be accepted without reservation.

25 See Shmuel Shepkaru, ‘Death Twice Over: Dualism of Metaphor and Realia in12th-Century Hebrew Crusading Accounts’, Jewish Quart. Rev., xciii (2002), 253.Cf. Jeremy Cohen, ‘Between Martyrdom and Apostasy: Doubt and Self-Definition in


This ambiguity also appears in a responsum by Rashi, concern-ing two families who bait each other incessantly. The communityorders them to desist, and one family refuses to comply. Amember of the other family promptly reminds his adversary

that he had been polluted during the period of destruction. Then one ofthem stood and told him: ‘Do not mention [it], for this has been thesubject of a decree’, and he did not state who had issued the relevantdecree. And now it has been learned that Rabbenu Gershom decreedthat anyone who mentions this shall be excommunicated.26

The protagonist that mentions Gershom’s ban uses the expres-sion ‘during the period of destruction’, which suggests that hethought, or at least contended, that Gershom’s ban appliedonly to coerced apostates. This, however, is open to question,because if a copyist erroneously had added just one letter to thisphrase, he would have transformed its meaning: bmy hShmdmeans ‘in the waters of destruction’, a common epithet for bap-tism, free of any element of coercion, but bymy hShmd refers to aperiod of persecution and thus to coerced apostasy. MedievalHebrew manuscripts are rife with scribal errors of this kind,and hence whether Gershom’s edict covered voluntary as wellas coerced apostasy cannot be determined. The confusion inthis case is, I think, typical of the absence of unequivocal distinc-tions in the high Middle Ages between coerced and voluntarybaptism, which suggests that to eleventh-century Jews such adistinction was unclear, unimportant or both.

A pair of contradictory rulings by Gershom of Mainz furtherillustrates this point. In one text Gershom allows a penitent apos-tate of priestly descent to perform the priestly blessing in thesynagogue, trumpeting the importance of allowing such aperson to return to his original status;27 but in anotherresponsum on the same case Gershom issues the opposite deci-sion.28 It has been suggested that the two responsa actually deal

(n. 25 cont.)

Twelfth-Century Ashkenaz’, Jl Medieval and Early Modern Studies, xxix (1999), 436–41.

26 Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (hereafter Rashi), Responsa, ed. Israel Elfenbein(New York, 1943), 82, no. 70.

27 Gershom ben Judah, Responsa, ed. Eidelberg, 57–60, no. 4; Simhah ben Samuelof Vitry, Mahzor Vitry, ed. Simon Hurwitz (Nuremberg, 1923), 97, x125 and latersources.

28 Gershom ben Judah, Responsa, ed. Eidelberg, 60–1, no. 5; Responsa and Rulings byFrench and German Rabbis [in Hebrew], ed. Ephraim Kupfer (Jerusalem, 1973), 292.


with different cases: the former with a coerced apostate and thelatter with a voluntary one, towards whose predicament Gershommight have been less sympathetic.29 This, however, is a dubiousdistinction, for we are told that the apostate under discussion hadbecome a clergyman, and it is therefore unlikely that his apostasywas coerced.30 Moreover, Rashi allows a penitent priest-apostateto resume his priestly status and functions whether or not hisapostasy was coerced.31 Only much later, in sixteenth-centurySafed, does Joseph Karo introduce the distinction between vol-untary or involuntary apostasy into the legal literature once andfor all.32

The absence of a clear distinction between coerced and volun-tary apostasy also emerges from Sefer Hasidim (Book of thePious), an ethical work of thirteenth-century Germany, consist-

29 Grossman, Early Sages of Ashkenaz, 125–6. Shlomo Eidelberg suggests thatGershom only ruled stringently when the apostate had become a leader or officiantin the service of idolatry, but, ironically, Grossman rejects this solution becauseGershom’s two decisions present an identical set of circumstances. Incidentally,Grossman’s interpretation suggests that he subscribes to the view that Gershom’sson was the victim of forced baptism, rather than voluntary apostasy, although hemakes no explicit statement to this effect.

30 Eliezer ‘the Great’, a student of Gershom, did distinguish clearly between vol-untary and coerced apostates, allowing only the latter to perform the priestly blessing,but his responsum was unknown in the Middle Ages: see Responsa of the Tosafists [inHebrew], ed. Irving A. Agus (New York, 1954), 45–6; Grossman, Early Sages ofAshkenaz, 224–5. The ruling of Joseph Bonfils resembles that of Maimonides, inthe tradition of the Babylonian Gaonim: see Zedekiah ben Abraham, Shiboleiha-Leqet ha-Shalem [Complete Sheaves of Gleanings], ed. Samuel K. Mirsky(New York, 1966), 231, x33. Grossman also cites Judah ha-Kohen, a student ofGershom, but does not provide a specific primary source.

31 The Tosafists cite Rashi’s stance on the priest-apostate (which was alsoGershom’s lenient position), but only after they offer the traditional, more stringentview, signifying that their stance on this issue was anything but slavish: see Tosafot onMenahot, 109r, s.v. ‘lo yeshamshu’; Tosafot on Sotah, 39r, s.v. ‘ve-khi mehader’. But cf.Tosafot on Ta 6anit, 27r, s.v. ‘iy mah’, which onlyoffers the lenient ruling. Note that Meirben Barukh of Rothenburg refuses to follow Rashi: he rules that one does not instructthe penitent priest to perform the priestly blessing, but that if he does so of his ownaccord, he may be allowed to proceed. See Jacob ben Asher, Arba6ah Turim [FourRows], pt 1, x128.

32 Joseph Karo, Bet Yosef [House of Joseph] on Arba6ah Turim, pt 1, x128; ShulhanArukh [Set Table], n. 37. Karo’s innovation can be attributed, at least partly, to the lossof tens of thousands of souls to Catholicism in Spain between 1391 and 1492, acatastrophe which generated a wealth of rabbinic discourse on the subject of apostasy,with an abundance of new insights. See Simhah Assaf, ‘The Conversos of Spain andPortugal in the Responsa Literature’ [in Hebrew], in his In the Tent of Jacob [inHebrew] (Jerusalem, 1943), 145–80; B. Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain: Fromthe Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources,3rd edn (Ithaca, 1999).


ing mainly of exempla, including one about two brothers whoapostatized. In this tale, a scholar wonders why such a tragedyshould befall a particular family, and determines that it wasthe result of the sin of their ancestor, who, as rabbi of a certaincommunity, led his entire congregation to the baptismal fontduring a time of persecution.33 As Alfred Haverkamp notes,what matters here is the linkage of voluntary and coerced apos-tasy: succumbing to coercion is seen as a sin, for which one payswith the voluntary apostasy of one’s children, particularly if onealso causes others to sin.34 This text suggests that there is a certainline of continuity between those who apostatize voluntarily andthose who do so under coercion. The author seems to feel thatalthough the latter acted against their will, their decision to livewas an act of weakness. In other words, capitulation under duresswas the result of a predisposition to apostatize, stemming from aless than robust religious commitment. The distinction betweenthe two categories is muddied and barely perceptible.

That the forced apostates of the First Crusade were not viewedby their memorializers as blameless emerges from an account ofthe mass apostasy of Regensburg, which concludes with theprayer: ‘And may our Rock grant us atonement for our sins’.35

Similarly, this narrative states that the apostasies of Metz were theconsequence of ‘the multitude of iniquity and culpability’,36 andconcludes with the prayer that God absolve His people’s iniqui-ties. These statements articulate the belief that even forced apos-tates were sinners, because only the shortcomings of one’s pastreligious faith and conduct could explain the occurrence of some-thing so awful. The line separating the coerced from the voluntaryapostate is similarly blurred in papal legislation. Jews baptized by

33 Sefer Hasidim [Book of the Pious], ed. Jehuda Wistinetzki and Jakob Freimann(Frankfurt am Main, 1924), 465, x1922. These dicta do not support HaymSoloveitchik’s claim that the Jews of Ashkenaz never wondered ‘to what extent theindividual was simply a victim of circumstances and to what extent his conduct was aconsequence of his inner ambiguities’: see Haym Soloveitchik, ‘Religious Law andChange: The Medieval Ashkenazic Example’, Assoc. for Jewish Studies Rev., xii (1987),215.

34 Alfred Haverkamp, ‘Baptised Jews in German Lands during the TwelfthCentury’, in Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (eds.), Jews and Christians inTwelfth-Century Europe (Notre Dame, Ind., 2001), 262. See also Baron, Social andReligious History of the Jews, iv, 146.

35 Abraham Meir Habermann, The Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France[in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1945), 56.

36 Ibid.


force were particularly likely to revert, and thus it was commonsense for Innocent III to declare, in 1201, that those ‘who neverconsented, but wholly objected, and accepted neither the realitynor the symbol of the sacrament’, were not to be consideredChristians.37 But this dispensation does not cover those whoaccepted baptism to avoid slaughter, for they — so the Churchdetermined — acted voluntarily, by preferring life to fidelity.

It may be, therefore, that the absence of a clear distinctionbetween the forced and willing apostate in the rabbinic literatureof medieval Ashkenaz reflects an ambivalence on the part of thesescholars towards the coerced. Given the universal belief in divineProvidence, the Ashkenazic authorities may have interpretedcapitulation to forced baptism as the result of a serious characterflaw in the victim, and thus effaced the distinction between vol-untary and involuntary apostasy. This distinction becameimportant for modern historians, who stressed coerced apostasyin order to present the Jews of Ashkenaz in a heroic light, but itwas of little consequence to the subjects of their investigations.

III

REVERSION

Ecclesiastical legislation on baptized Jews gives voice to the suspi-cion that their conversion was either insincere or incomplete.Burchard of Worms’s Decretum, dated 1012, deals extensivelywith this problem: converts may be forcibly prevented fromreverting to Judaism; they must not consort with Jews, for fearthat they might revert; lapsed converts are to be treated harshly.38

And this concern was perennial. In 1215 the Fourth LateranCouncil declared: ‘Some . . . who have come to the baptismalfont voluntarily have not departed completely the old self so asto put on a more perfect one. Since they retain remnants of their

37 ‘Numquam consentit sed penitus contradicit nec rem nec characterem suscipitsacramenti’. See Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, vii, History(Toronto, 1991), 243–4; Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 101–3; Baron, Social andReligious History of the Jews, ix, 13; Walter Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews(Ebelsbach, 1988), 82.

38 John Gilchrist, ‘The Perception of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of theFirst Two Crusades’, Jewish Hist., iii (1988), 13. See also Blumenkranz, Juifs etchretiens dans le monde occidental, 104–34.


former rite, they confound by such a mixture the decorum ofChristian religion’.39

An analogous concern is found on the Jewish side, namely thatreverting apostates might retain traces of Christian impurity, evenif their apostasy was coerced. About Benedict of York, who wasforcibly baptized in 1189 but later reverted, the chronicle ofRoger of Howden reports that ‘he was a stranger to thecommon burial-ground of the Jews, even as of the Christians;both because he had been made a Christian, and because, like adog to his vomit, he had returned to his Jewish depravity’.40 If thistale is to be believed, reversion did not necessarily lead to reinte-gration into the Jewish community, at least in this case. Suspicionof reverting apostates was aroused particularly if they remainedamong the Gentiles for ‘many days’.41 This is the crucial elementin the legend of Elhanan, the son of Rabbi Simon ‘the Great’ ofMainz, who is baptized as a child and rises through ecclesiasticalranks to become pope. Eventually he orchestrates a reunion withhis father and confesses his desire to revert, but asks him whetherrepentance is still possible, given the length of time he has spentamong the Gentiles.42 Predictably, then, another component in

(cont. on p. 18)

39 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 310; Baron, Social and Religious History of theJews, ix, 14. Haverkamp explains that Christians suspected Jewish converts of preserv-ing traces of their Jewish origins even after generations: see his ‘Baptised Jews inGerman Lands’, 265–7.

40 ‘. . . et factus est alienus a communi sepultura Judaeorum, similiter etChristianorum, tum quia factus fuerat Christianus, tum quia ipse, sicut canis reversusad vomitum, rediit ad Judaicam pravitatem’: see Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene,ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols. (Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, Rolls ser., li,London, 1868–71), iii, 13. The translation is from G. G. Coulton, Life in the MiddleAges, 2nd edn, 4 vols. in 1 (Cambridge, 1954), ii, 34. See also Cecil Roth, A History ofthe Jews in England (Oxford, 1941), 19–20, 22; Baron, Social and Religious History of theJews, iv, 125, 146. The dog-vomit image is based on Prov. 26:11; it had already beenused, in the same context, by Gregory the Great: see Shlomo Simonsohn, The ApostolicSee and the Jews, i, Documents, 492–1404 (Toronto, 1988), 5, doc. 5.

41 Cf. the similar issue of the speed with which a woman taken captive by Gentilesreturns to her community. Talmudic law assumes that such a woman has sexual rela-tions with one or more of her captors, but she may return to her husband if she rejoinedher community and family at the earliest possible opportunity, since one could thenassume that her sexual act had not been consensual. For the earliest discussion of thisissue, from late twelfth-century France, see Mordecai ben Hillel on Kiddushin, x568;Ephraim E. Urbach, The Tosaphists: Their History, Writings and Methods [in Hebrew],4th edn, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1980), i, 133. See also Gerald I. Blidstein, ‘The PersonalStatus of Apostate and Ransomed Women in Medieval Jewish Law’ [in Hebrew],Shenaton ha-Mishpat ha-Ivri, iii–iv (1976–7), 53.

42 See Adolf Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch [House of Study], 6 vols. (Jerusalem, 1938), v,148–52; Abraham David, ‘Inquiries Concerning the Legend of the Jewish Pope’


the Ashkenazic image is that all the apostates (who were few andcoerced) revert to Judaism at the earliest opportunity.43 Rever-sion is the key to the issue of coerced versus voluntary baptism,for non-reversion or delayed reversion undermines the edificeof coercion which underpins the heroic reputation of medievalAshkenaz.

The issue of immediate or delayed reversion is not the brain-child of modern historians, but is found in medieval sources. In aneffort to excuse the apostates, one of the Hebrew accounts main-tains that in 1096 the community of Regensburg reverted ‘imme-diately following the departure of the enemies of God, andperformed great acts of penitence, for they did what they didunder great duress’.44 In Metz, too, we read that the conversionlasted only ‘until the days of wrath had passed’, after which theapostates reverted to Judaism ‘with all their heart’.45 The pathoswith which the narrator emphasizes that reversion was immediateand unalloyed betrays the anxiety felt by many contemporariesconcerning the loyalty of these (or any) apostates.

The same chronicler introduces another apologetical elementwhen he insists that the forced apostates did not deviate from thedietary laws, and ‘only rarely went to their [Christian] place ofworship’. Moreover, we read that the converts’ Christian neigh-bours knew of the insincerity of their conversion, and that theseapostates observed the Sabbath laws in full view of the Christianpopulace.46 Clearly they thought that, although they could notyet revert, it was important to exhibit continued fidelity toJudaism, both actively, by continuing to observe the command-ments, and passively, by neglecting Christian rituals.47

(n. 42 cont.)

[in Hebrew], in Zvi Malachi (ed.), The A. M. Habermann Memorial Volume[in Hebrew] (Lod, 1983), 17–25; Abraham David, ‘Bemerkungen zur Legende vomjudischen Papst’, Freiburger Rundbrief: Beitrage zur christlich-judischen Begegnung,xxxvii–xxxviii (1985–6), 150–3; David Levine Lerner, ‘The Enduring Legend of theJewish Pope’, Judaism, xl (1991).

43 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 68, citing Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vi, 92–3.44 Habermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 56.45 Ibid.46 Ibid., 57.47 See Kanarfogel, ‘Rabbinic Attitudes toward Nonobservance’, 3; Netanyahu,

Marranos of Spain, 8–13. Cf. Soloveitchik’s claim that ‘the fidelity of the convertswas unquestioned’: see his ‘Religious Law and Change’, 215.


Pre-reversion behaviour is a crucial issue in one of Rashi’sresponsa.48 Asked whether the testimony of a reverted anuss, orforced convert, is admissible in a proceeding of Jewish law, Rashireplies that it would be, if it were known that the witness, prior tohis reversion, only violated Jewish law under compulsion; other-wise, he could not testify about what he had witnessed while anapostate, even though he ultimately reverted ‘properly’. Put morestarkly, Rashi could well imagine that a coerced apostate mightwillingly transgress the commandments, even the Sabbath, priorto his reversion.49

Obviously, any delay in reversion would probably be inter-preted as a sign that the act of apostasy had not been truly invol-untary, even when, as in 1096, the apostates accepted baptism atthe point of a sword. This suspicion seems reasonable when webear in mind that those who apostatized during the First Crusadetook up to a year to revert.50 In this light, the Hebrew chronicler’sfervent assurance that the First Crusade apostates rarely attendedCatholic services and continued to observe the commandmentsmakes sense, and one can also understand why some Jews mighthave been sceptical about the fidelity of those who reverted. Thenarrator indirectly acknowledges the existence of bad feeling inhis concluding admonishment: ‘Whoever speaks ill of them [theapostates], it is as if he spoke ill of the Divine Presence’.51 AnotherHebrew report of the First Crusade persecution puts this suspi-cion in the mouths of those Jews of Worms who escaped the cru-sader onslaught. The survivors express solidarity with the forcedconverts, but conclude with the warning: ‘Do not turn away fromthe Lord’.52

The issue of immediate or delayed reversion crops up again in aresponsum in which Rashi is asked whether one ought to abstainfrom wine handled by forced converts until these return toJudaism and remain Jewish for ‘many days’, and their repentance(that is, reversion) is public and well known. Speaking of thesepenitent apostates, Rashi’s interlocutor notes that ‘we do notknow them well and have not seen [evidence of] their repentance’.

48 Responsa of the Tosafists, ed. Agus, 51–2, no. 9.49 See, similarly, ibid., 238, no. 128, from a later period.50 Only in 1097 did Henry IV issue an edict permitting their reversion: Simonsohn,

Apostolic See and the Jews, i, 42, doc. 42.51 Habermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 57.52 Ibid., 96.


All the same, Rashi replies vehemently that to abstain from theirwine would shame them, and that coerced apostates could neverbring themselves to offer idolatrous libations (that is, to partici-pate in Christian worship). This formulation links reversion andcoercion. The penitent apostates in question are blameless, writesRashi, ‘for everything they did, they did on account of [fear of] thesword,53 and they turned away [from Christianity] as soon as theycould’.54 The question testifies to the prevalent confusion aboutthe significance of the distinction between forced and voluntaryapostasy. Rashi emphasizes the element of coercion, and, indeed,this is an exception to the indifference generally exhibited bymedieval authorities. However, by affirming that these apostateswere quick to revert, he grants the premise that the allegiance of aforced apostate remains suspect until he or she returns to thefold.55

Elsewhere Rashi writes, of ‘all the forced converts’, that ‘theirheart inclines heavenward, for their end testifies to their begin-ning, that they left and returned when they found salvation’.56

This looks like a ringing endorsement of the eternal loyalty of theforcibly baptized, but, upon closer inspection, the opposite isclearly the case. Rashi shares the conviction that one can onlybe sure that a forced convert’s heart inclined towards heavenafter his or her return to the fold, when ‘their end testifies totheir beginning’; until such time, an apostate is an apostate,whether baptism was voluntary or coerced.57 That Rashi didnot take reversion for granted is also apparent from his

53 evhat herev, as in Ezek. 21:20. The same phrase appears in the Sefer Hasidimpassage (ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 85, x262) about a community in which‘during a time of persecution some were killed and some apostatized with the intentionof returning to Judaism when they could, but they apostatized ‘‘on account of fear ofthe sword’’ ’.

54 Rashi, Responsa, ed. Elfenbein, 188–9, no. 168. The identity of these apostatesand the circumstances of their apostasy are unclear. Ben-Zion Dinur assumes that thistext refers to those Jews who apostatized under threat of death at the hands of the FirstCrusaders: Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel and the Diaspora [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1961), pt2a, p. 43. Ephraim E. Urbach attributes the responsum to Isaac Dampierre (d. 1185?),but offers no proof for this attribution: Urbach, Tosaphists, i, 244–5.

55 Cf., from a later period, Responsa of the Tosafists, ed. Agus, 231–2, no. 125.56 See Judah ben Asher, Zikhron Yehudah [Memory of Judah], ed. Judah Rosenberg

(Berlin, 1846), 52b. For the phrase ‘their end testifies to their beginning’, see alsoHabermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 26.

57 Cf. Grossman’s view that Rashi’s statement that the heart of the coerced apostatesis directed heavenward is to be taken at face value: Grossman, Early Sages of France,154.


interpretation of the passage in Proverbs about the ‘strangewoman’, from whom one needs to be saved (Prov. 2:16–19).Rashi equates this enigmatic figure with the Church, and on thephrase ‘All who go to her cannot return’ (Prov. 2:19) he makes thefollowing pessimistic observation: ‘All who apostatize, after theyare tainted with heresy, do not return’.58 The absence of anydistinction between coerced and voluntary apostasy resoundsloudly in this categorically dismissive remark.

Vacillation regarding the appropriate posture vis-a-vis revertingapostates, even those whose conversion was forced, is powerfullyexpressed in the following responsum, attributed to Rashi.59 Theissue is whether one may drink with a reverted apostate. Groundsare brought for a lenient ruling regarding apostates who, asChristians, did not violate the Sabbath laws; but what aboutforced converts who publicly transgressed these regulations andwhose reversion is as yet uncertain? Rashi rejects the view thatequates transgression of the Sabbath with idolatry, and insiststhat ‘when they undertook to publicly return to the awe of ourRock [i.e. to Judaism], they are [again] permitted’. The moststriking feature of this text is the question’s conflation of voluntaryand coerced apostates.

In the responsum cited earlier about the wine of penitent apos-tates, however, Rashi uses the phrase ‘these forced apostates thathave just arrived’. In rabbinic parlance, the expression ‘that havejust arrived’ sometimes refers to a recent occurrence (based onDeut. 32:17), and hence it could mean that these apostatesreverted recently. But Rashi could have meant the phrase literally,thereby testifying to the migration that seems to have frequentlyaccompanied reversion. Fear of prosecution for heresy was a goodreason for lapsed converts to leave their city and settle elsewhere.In a letter dated 1286, Pope Honorius IV complains that amongthose converts who reverted, some moved to another town, butmany others did not, and lived openly with Jews and at one withthem.60 The practice of relocation also finds expression in

(cont. on p. 22)

58 Rashi on Avodah zarah, 17r. The continuation reads: ‘and if they do return, theyquickly die, because of sorrow and the compulsion of the [Evil] Inclination, and this isthe decree of the King [i.e. God], that they die’. Cf. Rashi on Prov. 2:19.

59 Zedekiah ben Abraham Anau, Shibolei ha-Leqet — Part 2 [in Hebrew], ed. SimhahHassida (Jerusalem, 1988), 21–2, x5. The text was also published in Rashi’s Responsa,ed. Elfenbein, 189–90, no. 169.

60 Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, ix, 247 n. 13; Simonsohn, ApostolicSee and the Jews, i, 262–3, doc. 255. Edward Fram attributes the practice of moving


Hebrew sources, such as the responsum by Rashi (alluded toabove) concerning an apostate who is baptized in one place andlater reverts elsewhere.61 We also read, in the Hebrew narrative ofEphraim of Bonn, about a French priest who led forced convertsfrom Germany to France during the Second Crusade so that theycould revert to Judaism; obviously reversion in their home com-munities was an impossibility.62 This last anecdote contains atelling ambiguity. Ephraim writes that the reverting apostateswere to remain in France ‘until their baptism would be forgotten’.Obviously one concern would be that the ecclesiastical author-ities might persecute them as heretics. But an apostate might alsomigrate in order to avoid the opprobrium of his fellow Jews.Relocation granted reverting apostates a new start, for one’sformer confreres were not always quick to forgive the sin of apos-tasy, even when committed under duress.63

The sources cited illustrate plainly that Ashkenazic scholars ofthe high Middle Ages shared modern historians’ interest in thespeed with which forced converts reverted, but with a significantdifference. Whereas modern historians emphasize that reversionwas virtually immediate, medieval scholars (in their halachictexts) do not voice this assumption, nor do they take it as agiven that anussim, that is ‘forced ones’, make every effort toobserve the dos and don’ts of Jewish law prior to their reversion.To a surprising extent, and in contrast to many modern historical

(n. 60 cont.)

after reversion to the fact that political power in medieval Germany was decentralized:see his ‘Perception and Reception of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz andPre-Modern Poland’, Assoc. for Jewish Studies Rev., xxi (1996), 313.

61 Rashi, Responsa, ed. Elfenbein, 189–90, no. 169. In the late thirteenth century, anapostate named Andreas from the south of Italy writes that it is well known that poorapostates escape ‘to places where they are not known and revert to their origin’: seeJoseph Shatzmiller, ‘Jewish Converts to Christianity in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500’, in Michael Goodich, Sophia Menache and Sylvia Schein (eds.), Cross-Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on hisSixty-Fifth Birthday (New York, 1995), 315.

62 Habermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 122. This tale is toldby Ephraim ben Jacob of Bonn (b. 1132), who stresses that the reversion occurred ‘inthat same year’, namely 1147, and he rather triumphantly contrasts the fate of theseapostates with that of the crusaders, who left their homes never to be seen again.Oddly, however, Ephraim’s account does not include any large-scale incidents offorced baptism that correspond to the story of mass reversion.

63 It is also possible that relocation was a form of exile, a penance for the act ofapostasy: see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, H. Teshuvah, ch. 2, law 4.


presentations, medieval rabbis portrayed their constituents wartsand all.

IV

DISAPPEARANCE

‘Many Jews’, writes Solomon Zeitlin, ‘mourned for seven days ifone of their kin adopted another religion as they would if amember of their family had died’.64 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmidoes not discuss mourning rites, but he paints the same pictureof the apostate’s disappearance:

The apostate in the Middle Ages left not only the Jewish faith, but theJewish quarter, his family, his friends. Whatever the theoretical attitudethat might be taken toward him in theology and jurisprudence, consideredfrom a sociological point of view his rupture with the Jewish community wasgenerally complete.65

Gerald Blidstein, too, writes that ‘the apostate had burned allbridges’.66 These scholars reflect the widely held convictionthat in the eyes of his family and community, an apostate ceasesto exist. This idea portrays the medieval Jewish community aspure, if scarred; there may have been a few apostates, but theydeparted the scene. The resultant image is of a homogeneouscommunity of devoted believers.

The idea that apostates cease to exist, and hence that one mustmourn for them at the time of their apostasy as if they had died,has no obvious source. Some have inferred this from the case ofRabbenu Gershom’s son, interpreting the rabbi’s additional weekof mourning as an expression of mourning for the act of apostasyper se.67 Yet the texts are quite clear that Gershom wentinto mourning following his son’s death, not his apostasy.68

(cont. on p. 24)

64 Zeitlin, ‘Mummar and Meshumad’, 86.65 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘The Inquisition and the Jews of France in the Time of

Bernard Gui’, Harvard Theological Rev., lxiii (1970), 365. See also p. 366: ‘Greathostility toward the apostate, and the sober realization that in most cases his conver-sion to Christianity was final, combined to make the masses regard him as really nolonger a Jew’.

66 Gerald Blidstein, ‘Who Is Not a Jew? — The Medieval Discussion’, Israel LawRev., xi (1976), 376.

67 Louis Rabinowitz, The Social Life of the Jews of Northern France in the XII–XIVCenturies, as Reflected in the Rabbinical Literature of the Period, 2nd edn (New York,1972), 104.

68 Another source, also erroneous, is the remark by Rabbenu Tam that it is custom-ary not to mourn the death of an apostate; but, again, this remark says nothing about


One possible source, however, could be the statement in SeferHasidim, that: ‘When he [a person] apostatizes, it is appropriateto weep: when the body is lost one [generally] cries, a fortioriwhen the soul is lost . . .’.69 Weeping is a classic expression ofmourning, and thus this passage might be construed as a sourcefor the custom of mourning the act of apostasy. On the otherhand, Sefer Hasidim does not refer explicitly to the laws of mourn-ing, and, furthermore, statements such as these should probablybe read as hortatory, rather than prescriptive, since Sefer Hasidimis an ethical work, rather than a legal compendium.70 Anothersource might be the talmudic law that anyone who hears a fellowJew curse God must rend his garment. Apostasy might be con-sidered tantamount to cursing God, and in Jewish law the tearingof the clothes is a central component of the rites of mourning. Onecould therefore deduce from this rule that mourning is the appro-priate religious response to the act of apostasy.71

It is no accident, I think, that the medieval sources fail to docu-ment the practice of mourning apostates at the time of theirapostasy or to provide a clear rationale for doing so; the reason,I suggest, is that apostates did not disappear. Whether we situatethem on the Jewish end of the Christian social spectrum or on theChristian end of the Jewish social spectrum is semantic quibbling.Apostates were part of the panorama of Jewish society, and theyinteracted with their former coreligionists on a daily basis,whether for economic or social reasons.

The serial apostates, Jews who apostatize and then move backand forth between their old and new religious identities, offer

(n. 68 cont.)

mourning at the time of the apostasy and on its account: see Isaac ben Moses ofVienna, Or Zaru6a, pt 2, x428.

69 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 73–4, x192, cited by Katz, in hisExclusiveness and Tolerance, 74.

70 Another Sefer Hasidim passage (ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 385, x1572) statesthat one whose father apostatizes is called to read from the Torah not as the son of hisfather, but rather as the son of his paternal grandfather, by which name he must alsosign contracts. Furthermore, if both his father and his father’s father are apostates, heshould use the name of his paternal great-grandfather. The elimination of any refer-ence to the apostate father intimates that in a certain sense he ceases to exist. See alsoIsrael Isserlein, Terumat ha-Deshen [Offering of Ashes], pt 1, no. 21.

71 For the suggestion that apostasy is tantamount to death, see Sanhedrin, 60r (oncursing God); N. Z. Y. Berlin on She8iltot, no. 110. The link was noted by ReuvenMargaliyot, in his commentary to his own edition of Sefer Hasidim (Jerusalem, 1957),187, x190.


a special model of Jewish–apostate interaction, though we knownothing about how common a phenomenon this was. A famouscase, told in a thirteenth-century text about an incident thatpurportedly occurred in 992, is that of Sehok ben Esther, anapostate who wanders from town to town in northern France,poses as an indigent Jew and receives alms from the local Jewishcommunities. Ultimately he takes up residence in Le Mans, in thehome of his sisters, who surely knewof his apostasy.72 True or not,the tale was meant to be believed, and hence is evidence of socialnorms.

We also read of an apostate who allegedly ‘repented [i.e.reverted], not with a complete heart but with a deceitful repent-ance, like that of those empty ones, who roam the towns, some-times appearing as Jews and sometimes strengthening themselvesby means of the laws of the Gentiles’.73 Similarly, an earlythirteenth-century source reports of an apostate who ‘wentfrom place to place, and in one city he publicly avows his beliefin idolatry, and in another city he enters the House of Israel andsays that he is a Jew, and we do not know whether he is a Jew ornot’.74 From Eudes Rigaud, the archbishop of Rouen, we learn ofa serial apostate whose repeated changes of heart appear to havebeen sincere. He was burned in 1266, having converted fromJudaism to Catholicism, ‘reverted from the Catholic faith toJudaic depravity, and once again baptized, had once morereverted to Judaism, being unwilling afterwards to be restored

72 Habermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 11–15; see alsoMalkiel, ‘Jewish–Christian Relations’, 67–71.

73 Mordecai ben Hillel on Ketubot, x306; Maimonidean Responsa [in Hebrew],Nashim, no. 10. Likewise, Ephraim of Bonn tells the tale of the encounter, in 1146,just outside the city of Cologne, between ‘empty people’ who had been baptized (i.e.voluntary apostates) and Rabbi Simon ‘the Pious’ of Trier, and of their efforts to enticehim to apostatize: Habermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 116.

74 Solomon Ibn Adret, Responsa, pt 7, no. 179. On this source and the previous one(Mordecai ben Hillel on Ketubot, x306), see Urbach, Tosaphists, i, 245; Soloveitchik,‘Religious Law and Change’, 214 n. 15. There is some evidence, including theMordecai ben Hillel text, that apostates wishing to revert were forced to undergoritual immersion before their reintegration into the Jewish community: seeYerushalmi, ‘Inquisition and the Jews of France’, 372; Joseph Shatzmiller,‘Converts and Judaizers in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Harvard Theological Rev.,lxxiv (1981), 63–77; Blidstein, ‘Who Is Not a Jew?’, 376 n. 23. Placing obstacles in thepath of reversion seems to be a phenomenon of the later Middle Ages, rather than thetenth to thirteenth centuries.


to the Catholic faith, although several times admonished todo so’.75

There are, moreover, apostates who do not revert, but none-theless maintain close ties with their Jewish friends, relatives andcommunity, and this is even more important for the issue of theapostates’ presence in medieval Jewish society.76 Apostates mightchoose to preserve their relationships with their former coreligio-nists out of economic expedience: as Christians, they were now atliberty to borrow money from Jews, although Jewish law had pre-viously prevented them from doing so.77 And the normalcy of fre-quent social interaction between Jews and apostates is evident inthe famous responsum of Rabbenu Tam (discussed earlier) aboutthe twenty bills of divorce issued in Paris.78 This scholar statesthat Jews routinely referred to apostates by their Jewish names,even if they knew their Christian ones, demonstrating that intwelfth-century France Jews and apostates interacted freely,and that the latter cannot be said to have disappeared. This textalso addresses the apostate’s mindset, or at least the author’s per-ception thereof. Regarding the rule that if a person had twonames, both were to appear in his bill of divorce, Rabbenu Tamwrites that this was true only when the husband habitually usedboth names: ‘Here, however, he does not normally use his non-Jewish name, but rather the Jewish name with which he grew upall his life, up to the present time’.79 Rabbenu Tam is convincedthat, regardless of his religious convictions, an apostate couldnever rid himself of his Jewish cultural baggage.

Sefer Hasidim refers to apostates who give charity to the Jewishpoor80 or to the local rabbi.81 We read that one may pray for the

75 Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History(Baltimore, 1973), 147.

76 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 75.77 Ibid., 71; Jacob Katz, ‘Although He Has Sinned, He Is Still Israel’ [in Hebrew],

Tarbiz, xxvii (1958). See also Yitzhak Baer, ‘Rashi and the Historical Reality of hisTime’ [in Hebrew], Tarbiz, xx (1950), 324–32. For pre-Rashi scholars, see Eliezer ofMetz, Sefer Yere8im ha-Shalem [Complete Book of the Awed Ones] (Vilna, 1902), 74r,x156; Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg, Responsa, Prague edn, no. 799.

78 Sefer ha-Yashar, ed. Rozenthal, 43–5, x25.79 Ibid., 46, no. 26; Sefer ha-Yashar: Novellae, ed. Simon Shlesinger (Jerusalem,

1959), 448, no. 766. See also Simhah ben Samuel of Vitry, Mahzor Vitry, ed.Hurwitz, 779–80, x134. Cf. Sefer Hasidim, ed. Margaliyot, 187, x191, which statesthat one attaches a new name of opprobrium to an apostate. For the talmudic basis ofthis rule, see Avodah zarah, 46r.

80 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 408, x1701.81 Ibid., x1702.


soul of an apostate who performs deeds favourable to the Jews.82

The story is also told of an apostate who offers to contributemoney towards the acquisition of a Torah scroll.83 These passagespresent impressive evidence of the continued involvement of theapostate in Jewish social and religious life. Another Sefer Hasidimpassage contemplates the issue of apostates who attempt to helpthe Jewish community, either by offering to save Jewish booksfrom a fire on the Sabbath or by burying an unknown deceasedperson. Cognizant of the ambivalence a Jew might feel in such asituation, the text nonetheless declares that the assistance shouldbe accepted, unless the apostate’s behaviour had been so deplor-able as to result in a communal decision not to bury him as a Jewfollowing his death.84 The end of this passage is its most strikingfeature, for this legal decision implies that in less extreme casesapostates were buried as Jews, which would obscure the socialboundary between them and the Jewish community.85 SeferHasidim also testifies to intellectual exchange between Jews andapostates: ‘If one hears a good explanation or a good question oranswer from a Christian or from an apostate or from someonewho causes others to sin, he should not tell others anything in hisname’.86

Needless to say, interaction was not always friendly. Followingthe Blois killings of 1171, the Jewish community of Troyesadopted austerities in memory of the martyrs, and one of theletters about the incident concludes with a warning to erase thepassage about these austerity measures, ‘lest it be seen by apos-tates and delators’, who presumably read Hebrew.87 The crucialpoint here is the assumption that apostates might gain access tothe text in question, which implies a high degree of involvement inJewish life. Suspicion of apostates also surfaces in the story told inSefer Hasidim about an apostate who asks three scholars theiropinion concerning his dilemma: he intends to return toJudaism, but has little money. The Gentiles trust him, meaningthat they are unaware of his lack of true religious devotion, and he

82 Ibid., 385, x1571.83 Ibid., 73, x190; 178, x679. See also ibid., 357, x1476.84 Ibid., 164, x604.85 Obviously this contradicts the testimony about Benedict of York, cited above,

who allegedly was not buried among the Jews despite his reversion.86 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 198, x790; 357, x1476.87 Habermann, Book of the Persecutions of Ashkenaz and France, 146.


would like permission to take a substantial sum of money fromthem before his reversion.88 One scholar grants permission, asecond refuses it, each for his own reasons. A third wise manrecommends that no one answer the question, lest the apostatereport to the authorities that the rabbis were responsible for thereversion. In the end, we are told, the apostate did, indeed, makethis accusation.89 This text and the previous one testify that,friendly or not, apostates were thought to be abreast of the com-munity’s affairs.90

Apostates, then, did not disappear from Jewish society, butwere, rather, a ubiquitous and perennial constituency. This hasan important implication for the visionary policy of Rashi, whoruled consistently that an apostate remains a Jew — ‘although hehas sinned, he is still Israel’.91 We now understand that this stra-tegic decision reflects not an ideal, but a reality. In medievalAshkenaz the apostate really was ‘still Israel’. Rashi, it seems,was right.

V

AETIOLOGY

The Jews of twelfth-century Germany are alleged by historians tohave been ‘beset by varying sorts and degrees of doubt concerningthe worth, viability, and future of their faith’.92 Avraham Gross-man avers that the Hebrew First Crusade narratives, with theirmartyrological bias, were written ‘to encourage the weak andstrengthen weak knees’.93 He views European Jewry as demor-

88 An analogous story exists from the Christian side, of a certain Jacob ben Isaac ofRegensburg, who hoards his father’s money prior to his own conversion toChristianity: see Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden, 105, x226. The source isAnnales Egmundenses: Fontes Egmundenses, ed. Otto Oppermann (Utrecht, 1933),149–50, cited by Haverkamp, ‘Baptised Jews in German Lands’, 279–81.

89 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 75, x200. See also ibid., x201; Fram,‘Perception and Reception of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz and Pre-Modern Poland’, 306.

90 Isaac ben Moses of Vienna tells of an apostate who touched wine, which wouldrender it non-kosher, but later claimed to have reverted: see his Or Zaru6a, pt 1, 64d,x448.

91 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 71; Katz, ‘Although He Has Sinned, He Is StillIsrael’. See also Baer, ‘Rashi and the Historical Reality of his Time’.

92 Cohen, ‘Between Martyrdom and Apostasy’, 463.93 Grossman, ‘Roots of Kiddush Hashem’, 119.


alized by the carnage of the Rhineland massacres and worn downby the pressure of Christian propaganda.94

Whether or not apostasy among Ashkenazic Jewry truly hadrisen to alarming proportions, it is clear that some apostateswere not driven to baptism by a crisis of faith. Basically, therewere ideological apostates, whose conversion was as sincere asPaul’s or Augustine’s, and there were also venal apostates, whoopted for baptism for social, economic, psychological or otherreasons. Which category predominated? The heroic image ofAshkenazic Jewry would seem to require that in Franco-Germany apostasy was overwhelmingly venal, and this is indeedthe consensus. In Haym Soloveitchik’s formulation, some con-verted ‘from conviction, some from desire for advancement, andsome, probably most, from sheer weariness’ (whatever thatmeans).95 Admittedly, venal apostasy, too, challenges the imageof Ashkenazic perfection, but to a lesser degree.

Medieval Hebrew sources give the distinct impression thatapostates were mostly venal, rather than ideological. Examplesare legion. The Sefer Nizzahon Yashan (Old Book of Disputation),an anti-Christian polemic of thirteenth-century Germany, statesthat a Jew becomes an apostate (nishtamed) ‘to enable himself toeat all that his heart desires, to give pleasure to his flesh with wineand fornication, to remove from himself the yoke of the kingdomof heaven . . . cleave to sin and concern himself with worldlypleasures’.96 This is a classic description of the venal apostate,albeit grotesquely exaggerated; but, more importantly, it refusesto acknowledge ideological apostasy.

Venal apostasy receives a great deal of attention in SeferHasidim. We read of a villain who threatens to apostatize if his

94 Grossman, Early Sages of France, 267.95 Soloveitchik, ‘Religious Law and Change’, 214. Cf. the typology presented, for

the later Middle Ages, by Joseph Shatzmiller in his ‘Jewish Converts to Christianity inMedieval Europe’. Jacob Katz seems to be swimming upstream when he observes,with a vaguely belligerent air: ‘Christian sources tell us of many Jews who acceptedChristianity through conviction, and we have no reason to doubt this’. Katz also writesthat ‘some genuine conversions must have occurred at a time when the whole of societylived in a state of religious tension’, a minimalistic formulation designed, it seems, tooverturn a contrary consensus or predisposition. See Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance,75–6.

96 The Jewish–Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of theNizzahon Vetus, ed. and trans. David Berger (Philadelphia, 1979), 206, x211, citedin Cohen, ‘Between Martyrdom and Apostasy’, 462–3. See also Jewish–ChristianDebate, ed. Berger, 228, x242.


request for charity is not granted;97 of a young man who threatensto apostatize unless he is allowed to marry the girl who has won hisheart;98 of a father and son who sit in judgement, and the sonurges his father to bend the law, lest the (undeserving) litigantapostatize;99 of a son who threatens apostasy after his fatherupbraids him for having committed adultery.100 Exasperatedfathers are warned that ill-behaved children will apostatize ifone lashes out at them: ‘Go apostatize!’101 Jacob Katz labels theapostates in these scenarios ‘iniquitous sons’.102

A large group of venal apostates are those who sought economicand social advancement. These were sometimes susceptibleto financial inducements to revert to Judaism, but the reversionof this type of apostate was particularly suspect. The Church,too, felt the sting of venal apostasy. In 1169 Pope Alexander IIIwrote that converts ‘despaired easily and might be compelledto forsake the Christian faith on account of indigence and thelack of assistance, thus returning to their former religion likethe dog to his vomit’.103 Borrowing the idiom, the Council atTours (1233) warned that unless Christians gave generously,‘poverty should compel converted Jews to return to theirvomit’.104 More significant than the choice of idiom, however,is the formulation that converts despair easily ( facile desperant),which reflects the fluidity of traffic — particularly of venal apos-tates — across the Jewish–Christian frontier. Pope Innocent IIIvoiced similar concerns. In 1199 he wrote to the bishop ofAutun about the importance of supporting converts, lest ‘theshame of poverty, which they are not accustomed to bear easily,force them to look back (retro aspicere) to the abandoned Jewish

97 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetzki and Freimann, 215, x857.98 Ibid., 455, x1876.99 Ibid., 336, x1376.

100 Ibid., 459, x1897.101 Sefer Hasidim, ed. Margaliyot, 326, x479. See also ibid., 416, x637: ‘A person

ought not to say to a Jew: ‘‘If I do such and such a thing, I am not a Jew’’, for were he todo it, he would be making himself a Gentile or an apostate, for one ought not to say anevil thing, even conditionally’.

102 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 74. See also William Chester Jordan,‘Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda’, in Signerand Van Engen (eds.), Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe.

103 Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, vii, 244–5; i, 52, doc. 50.104 Parkes, Jew in the Medieval Community, 144.


perfidy’.105 That very year a papal letter to the abbot of a conventin Leicester states:

Care must be taken that they [converts] should be solicitously providedfor, lest, in the midst of other faithful Christians, they become oppressedby lack of food. For lacking the necessities of life, many of them, after theirbaptism, are led into great distress, with the result that they are oftenforced to go backward because of the avarice of such as are possessed ofplenty — yet scorn to look at the Christian poor.106

Not only do medieval sources present more evidence of venalthan ideological apostasy, they expressly posit that apostasy ispredominantly venal. Rashi and other European authoritiesaccept the traditional Jewish assumption that women whochoose to apostatize do so for romantic or erotic reasons.107

However, they seem confident that men, too, are rarely convincedof the truth of Christianity. In a case cited earlier about a serialapostate seeking recognition of his Jewish identity, the rabbis ofnorthern France decide to accept his claim, because they assumethat his earlier protestations of faith in Christianity were insin-cere, while his current declaration of faith in Judaism is believable,‘since our faith is an honest, good, correct and true one’.108

Because the idea that one could choose Christianity in goodfaith strikes these luminaries as patently absurd, their workingassumption is that any apostate must be a venal apostate.

Modern historiography, on the other hand, tends to downplayvenal apostasy and to spotlight the implosion of the ideologicalapostate’s religious identity. Apostasy is thus portrayed in sombretones, as an act of immeasurable pathos. This meshes with thegeneral tenor of descriptions of Jewish–Christian relations inmedieval Europe, particularly after the First Crusade. The

105 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 94–6, doc. 6. Similarly, see ibid., 138–9, doc.29.

106 Ibid., 96–9, doc. 8. See also Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, ix, 21.107 Rashi discusses such a case and admits that some (scholars) ‘make noise’ — i.e.

express doubt — about this rule, but he dismisses their reservations: Mordecai benHillel on Ketubot, x286. See Blidstein, ‘Personal Status of Apostate and RansomedWomen in Medieval Jewish Law’, 56–9. Blidstein infers from this noise-making thatpopular practice did not always require reverting apostates to separate from theirspouses. He also deduces that reversion was common, but this conclusion, while itmay be true, is not warranted by the case at hand. For a similar case from a later period,see Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg, Responsa, Prague edn, no. 1020.

108 Solomon Ibn Adret, Responsa, pt 7, no. 179, cited in Soloveitchik, ‘Religious Lawand Change’, 214 n. 15.


prevailing tendency has been to highlight religious tension and topresent a picture of polarized relations and segregation.109 Thisimage cannot be reconciled with the casual nature of apostasyreflected in the model of the iniquitous sons or in the phenom-enon of serial reversion.

Gloom-and-doom portrayals of Jewish–Christian interactionin medieval Ashkenaz tend to highlight regulations enactedby communal leaders in order to restrict socialization withChristians, including a severe taboo against wine handled byChristians.110 But these regulations actually reveal that mostJews saw no need to protect themselves from Gentile society bymeans of a self-imposed legislative wall of isolation. Thus, also,the regulations issued by the Fourth Lateran Council regardingthe difficulty in distinguishing Jew from Christian, and the needto do so, show the ease with which Jews and Christians interactedand the extent of Jewish acculturation in European society.111

Indeed the evidence of civil and even amiable relations is abun-dant.112 A Christian neighbour of Rashi’s sends him cakes andeggs on the eighth day of Passover.113 Similarly, Jews give presentsto their Christian servants on Purim.114 Christian women solicitdonations from Jews during Lent.115 Given these sorts of prac-tices, how polarized could the relations between Jews andChristians have been?

What requires re-examination, then, is not only the nature ofapostasy but the climate in which it took place. The present study

109 See, for example, Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews, ii, From the Roman Empireto the Early Medieval Period, trans. Moshe Spiegel (New York, 1968), 705. See alsoGrossman, Early Sages of France, 24–5.

110 Jeremy Cohen, ‘The Mentality of the Medieval Jewish Apostate: Peter Alfonsi,Hermann of Cologne, and Pablo Christiani’, in Todd M. Endelman (ed.), JewishApostasy in the Modern World (New York, 1987), 21–2; Haym Soloveitchik, ‘CanHalakhic Texts Talk History?’, Assoc. for Jewish Studies Rev., iii (1978);Haym Soloveitchik, Principles and Pressures: Jewish Trade in Gentile Wine in theMiddle Ages [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2003).

111 Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, revised edn, ed. Cecil Roth(London, 1932), 423.

112 Irving A. Agus, The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry: The Jews of Germany andFrance of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, the Pioneers and Builders of Town-Life, Town-Government, and Institutions (New York, 1969), 341–58.

113 Rashi, Responsa, ed. Elfenbein, 142, no. 114.114 Ma6aseh ha-Ge8onim [Acts of the Giants], ed. Abraham Epstein and Jacob

Freimann (Berlin, 1909), 46–7. See also Grossman, Early Sages of France, 143 n. 81.115 Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg, Responsa, Rulings and Customs [in Hebrew], ed.

Isaac Ze8ev Kahana (Jerusalem, 1960), ii, 230, no. 130.


offers an alternative to the image of Jews and Christians in per-petual conflict, of spiritual warfare between the two religiouscommunities. For the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz apostasy andapostates were part of everyday life. Jews traversed the religiousboundary with a nonchalance that bespeaks a high degree ofsocial and cultural intimacy with their Christian neighbours.

This sort of profile has typically been associated with the Jews ofmedieval Spain, and thus our findings cast doubt upon theAshkenaz–Sepharad dichotomy, mentioned at the outset. Thishas also been the direction of some recent studies of SpanishJewry, particularly with regard to the riots of 1391. Rather thandepict apostasy as the overwhelming Jewish response to the wide-spread violence, scholars have begun to attribute greater signifi-cance to martyrdom.116 From both perspectives, then, Ashkenazno longer looks quite so different from Sepharad, despite the veryreal differences between the cultural horizons and social status ofthe Jews in these two centres.

The Ashkenaz–Sepharad dichotomy carried implications forhistorians of the modern era, who identified the modern Jewwith his Sephardic ancestor, because the more affluent andpowerful Spanish Jews mingled freely with Christians and werehighly acculturated.117 One may still maintain that intimacybreeds apostasy, but this premise can no longer be restricted toSpain, any more than Ashkenaz provides a model of unremittinghostility on the one hand, and Jewish introversion and fidelity onthe other. Careful examination of the interplay of these character-istics in other historical contexts, such as first-century Alexandriaor seventeenth-century Amsterdam, may lead to the furtherrefinement of working assumptions in this area of concern.

These findings are also of some moment for those engaged inneighbouring disciplines, particularly for sociologists concernedwith contemporary Jewry, who confront the problem of sustain-ing and deepening Jewish identity in the open society of the

116 Marc Saperstein, ‘A Sermon on the Akedah from the Generation of theExpulsion and its Implications for 1391’, in Aharon Mirsky, Avraham Grossmanand Yosef Kaplan (eds.), Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People(Jerusalem, 1991); Ram Ben-Shalom, ‘Martyrdom and Jewish Martyrology in Aragonand Castile in 1391: Between Sepharad and Ashkenaz’ [in Hebrew], Tarbiz, lxx(2001).

117 Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation,1770–1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 104–23; Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping ofJewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit, 1989), 117.


western world. Yet the dilemma is of course not strictly a Jewishone, but rather a fundamental concern of minorities of any eraand locale. Be it in Reformation Europe or in many of today’smulticultural societies, ethnic, national, racial or religious minor-ities must always negotiate the social and cultural frontier with thelarger population group so as to achieve political and economicsurvival without having to relinquish their heritage and forfeittheir identity.

Bar-Ilan University David Malkiel


Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe -- Boundaries Real and Imagined

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