Christian Violence against Jews

The appalling drama of medieval anti-Jewish violence - and the ways in which it has seemed useful for explaining, through etiology, inexplicable modern violence and attempted genocide - has often crowded out both medieval pecularities and the breadth of Jewish life in the European Middle Ages.

in violence projected through and upon non-Christians'. Hussein Fancy, ‘Theologies of Violence: The Recruitment of Muslim Soldiers by the Crown of Aragon', Past & Present 221 (2013), 39-73, at 43.

6 See on this David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

7 Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: RethinkingJewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 89. could coexist with both interreligious harmony and flourishing Jewish experience.^[927]

To generalise: in the early part of the Middle Ages, Jewish communities received legal protections and sometimes privileges from secular authorities. These protections cooperated with, and were reinforced by, ecclesiastical exhortations to Christians to tolerate Jews in a ‘doctrine of witness'. This theological premise of toleration, credited to Augustine of Hippo (354-430), emphasised the utility of Jews in focusing Christian memory onto Christ's sacrificial death. Other theological premises contributed; so, for example, Jews would convert as a sign of the apocalyptic Last Days, and spiritually ‘blind' Jews were prevented from properly recognising Jesus as messiah.^[928] We should not misunderstand or overcredit the legal status assigned to Jews by secular authorities, however, as ‘protection' enshrined difference, and could be capriciously withdrawn.

These sentiments and tactics are not easily mapped in time, and they often coexisted with and even reinforced each other. In the early Middle Ages, insecurity of the Jewish experience is perhaps most visible amid the religious and political tensions of the Visigothic kingdom on the Iberian peninsula, a post-Roman state that struggled to establish royal legitimacy, smooth succes­sion, and maintain harmony between its Germanic ruling elite and the majority Ibero-Romans. The Arian Christianity of the Visigoths conflicted with their subjects' Nicene Christianity and Judaism, eventually leading to King Reccared's conversion to Nicene Christianity in 589. What followed were state attempts to eradicate both Arian Christianity and Judaism, and there were repeated calls forcibly to convert the kingdom's Jewish commu­nity. This was not the last time that Judaism would be swept up in a totalising vision of a united Christian community, or was teamed with ‘heresy' as an object of persecution. Still, the early Middle Ages demonstrate comparatively few instances of violence against Latin Europe's Jews.

This is one reason why historians of Jewish-Christian relations struggle with long-view interpretation. The early Middle Ages show us little violence; by the late Middle Ages, the violence was marked. Can or should we identify a ‘watershed' moment?¹¹ An apparent one is 1096, when rogue soldiers en route from France to Palestine to fight the First Crusade attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland towns of northern France and Germany.

While the sources are problematic, what seems sure is that the new ideology of crusade - which impugned intra-Christian violence while morally valorising violence against Christianity's supposed enemies - influenced these attacks. This was so despite clerical and papal insistence that the situation of Europe's Jewish subjects differed radically from Muslims in the Holy Land. Nevertheless, crusading and anti-Jewish violence remained close ideologically and in reality. The famous Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) preached both in favour of the Second Crusade, and against anti-Jewish violence, in 1146. The Crusades brought into public discourse language about ‘enemies of God'; more subtly, they formed part of a broader ecclesiastical globalist ideology that affected popular notions of Jews' place within Christian polities.

Various kinds of violence against Jews accelerated after the Rhineland attacks in 1096. Accelerating simultaneously was a changing narrative about European Christians' Jewish neighbours. Beyond the experience of crusades - but fitting neatly into their moral and theological anthropology dividing the world into Christians, not-yet-Christians and enemies of Christians - Jews began to be depicted increasingly as the third of these categories. Commercial changes in the urban economies of the high Middle Ages led to the involvement ofJews in usury (lending money at interest), an activity from which Christians benefited and in which they gladly engaged, but that generated accusations of Jewish financial exploitation and greed.

The most notorious example of interpenetrating slander and violence - premised upon the notion ofJews' own past and present violence - is the development in the twelfth century of accusations of ‘ritual murder' and ‘blood libel'. In tales of ritual murder, Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children at Easter to restage Christ's crucifixion, thus associating the supposed guilt of long-dead, faraway Jews with present crimes ofJewish Europeans. ‘Blood libel' claimed that Jews used Christian blood in order to make the unleavened bread eaten at Passover. The historian Gavin Langmuir identified an English monk, Thomas of Monmouth, as the shaper of this legend (c. 1150), in his eagerness to transform the slain child William of Norwich into a saint. Still, we should note that, in Thomas's tale, the Christian who found William assumed the murderer was a Jew because of the ‘unusual cruelty' apparent in his manner of death. It was this assertion of Jewish cruelty and wickedness that sustained the numerous reported cases of ritual murder, premised upon ridiculously scanty or non-existent grounds, dotting the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond.1⁴ These accusations usually led to violence, whether the attacks of a mob enraged by the supposed crime, or secular punishment following from legal procedure or formal charges.

As the Middle Ages progressed, we see a general cultural-religious conclu­sion among Christians of all kinds that Jews were enemies of Christ and of Christians, and that conclusion created a versatile template for violent action. The notion of an international Jewish conspiracy to do harm to Christians that appeared in some ritual murder accusations was expandable. New circum­stances could be adapted to this template to generate and justify further violence. After the coming of the Black Death to Europe in 1347, Jews were believed to have caused the illness by poisoning the drinking water in wells, and were burned. German chronicler and canonist Heinrich von Diessenhofen (c. 1300-76) recounted a full year of torture and killings for ‘all the Jews between Cologne and Austria' during 1348 and 1349. These burnings were both ad hoc and formal, and, as would be the case with inquisitions, violence spurred further violence as torture prompted ‘confessions' that validated past, and justified future, persecutions. Jewish communities in Germany experienced popular violence throughout the fourteenth century.^[935] Yet it is important to note that violence against Jews did not result only from accusations of immediate guilt; it was rather embedded within a general conception that violence was a means to glorify God. One of the most striking incidents of anti- Jewish violence arose amid the preaching tours of Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419) in Iberia. Their resultant blend of Christian piety and violence in pogroms produced a sizeable new demographic of converted Jews.^[936]

The intersection of conversion and violence was complicated.^[937] In the Middle Ages forced baptism of adults and children (sometimes seized from their parents for this purpose) was generally a result of popular upheaval, and not of state or ecclesiastical policy. Indeed, popes and clerics reiterated that Jews were not to be compelled to the faith through violence.

Despite this pondering about consent, we should not assume that clerics interpreted ‘force' generously. Here too we see change by the high Middle Ages. Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216), so fond of crusades against Islam and the caller of the Albigensian Crusade against heresy, issued Maiores ecclesie in 1201, which contended that only active physical resistance could prove an invalid baptism.¹⁹ One of our best glimpses into forced conversion - and how Christians could read it afterwards as salutary divine intervention - is the case of Baruch the German, converted in 1320 during the Pastoreaux rampages in southern France (the region brought into the French domain by the Albigensian Crusade, see below). This so-called Shepherds' Crusade, an out­growth of lingering crusading fervour after the wars in the east effectively ended in 1291, included mass attacks upon Jews and lepers by wandering, self­styled ‘crusaders'. Baruch (who had several Christian friends) submitted to a hasty baptism during a day in which he estimated 150 of his fellow Jews in Toulouse were killed. When Baruch later returned to Judaism, maintaining that his baptism was invalid, he was arrested as a relapsed heretic. His inquisitorial trial for relapse, conducted by Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers, lasted weeks, hinging on notions of consent, resistance and Trinitarian theology. Reflecting Maiores ecclesie, Bishop Fournier insisted that Baruch's baptism was valid, a denouement that allowed its Christian

feint at persuasion. Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke, Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263: A Graphic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Robert Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Semitism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

19 Pennington, ‘Law's Violence', 30; Rist, Popes and Jews, pp. 76-8. witnesses to cast ‘conditional' force as divine will, an imperfect beginning that ended in the positive good of a saved soul.^[938]

As Baruch's case also demonstrates, popular violence and forced conver­sion interpenetrated with another way in which Jews began to suffer increas­ing ‘official' violence as the Middle Ages wore on. The ecclesiastical courts of inquisitiones hereticae pravitatis, and their accompanying coercions of arrest, torture, punishment and execution, were not technically the domain for unbaptised Jews. But after heresy inquisitions were installed in western Europe beginning in the 1230s, both converted and unconverted Jews were gradually drawn into its jurisdiction.^[939] That expansion was related both to Christian universalism (Jews lay within the theological space of Christianity, whether they recognised it or not) and to the narrative ofJews as enemies of Christ and Christians. Pope Clement IV's Turbato corde (1267), which was reissued by successive popes, instructed heresy inquisitors to pursue not only Christians who ‘have damnably crossed over to the rite of the Jews' (both those born Christians and converts from Judaism), but also Jews who had persuaded them to convert. Medieval inquisitions, which were institutionally weak and not especially institutionalised, were more concerned with Christian heresy. But the Spanish Inquisition was explicitly founded in 1478 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to pursue Jewish converts to Christianity (conversos) believed guilty of reverting to Judaism, as well as various people, beliefs and actions tinged with judaising'.^[940]

Violence against Jews was never uncomplicated, particularly when the state's competing interests - to protect the Jews from violence or to impose it - had to be weighed. An example is the anti-Jewish riots in England at the ascension of Richard I (r. 1189-99), which began in London and spread geographically in the kingdom. His coronation was coincident with calls for the Third Crusade (to recover Jerusalem, lost to Saladin in 1187), and crusade fervour against non-Christians combined with anger over debts owed to Jews. The violence crested in York in 1190, when after a few days of attacks the city's Jewish community, about 150 strong, was massacred at their refuge in Clifford's Tower. According to the Christian chronicler William of Newburgh, the violence in York was a combination of enraged frenzy and reasoned strategies to erase debts; it was committed by nobles and the ‘mob' alike; it involved authorities who both protected and abandoned the Jews. Also, the palette of violence in the York incident was varied: theft, arson, forced baptisms and murder.^[941] In the English episodes of 1189-90, neither the Christian violence nor King Richard's interests in responding to it can be reduced to a single motive, and we see how violence betrayed the complex role of the state. Sometimes the state itself enacted or permitted violence against Jews. Nearly a century after the York massacre, England's aggressive prosecution of ‘coin-clipping' in 1278-9 led to the execution of about 300 Jews.^[942] Yet sometimes the state restrained violence. Bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253) once intervened to free several Oxford students who, significantly, had been imprisoned for attacking local Jews. AJewish chronicler reported that even though Count Theobald of Blois executed Jews by burning in 1171, he also angrily punished Christians who attacked Jews escaping the fire, distinguishing between extra-judicial and his own judicial violence.^[943] Secular rulers gained little in permitting the law­lessness signalled by popular attacks upon Jews - which undermined author­ity and potentially found other targets - but they also risked much from subjects and even some clerics in defending them. What determined the course of state action was a host of multi-layered contingencies, including concerns about public order, local intrigues, efforts to increase or to redeploy state power, the piety of the individual ruler, and also that ruler's own conception of what treatment of Jews that piety demanded.

This was the backdrop for a different kind of anti-Jewish violence: the forced expulsion of Jewish communities. Edward I expelled Jews from the kingdom of England in 1290, Philip IV from the kingdom of France (1306), Ferdinand and Isabella from the newly united kingdom of Spain (1492) and Joao II from Portugal (1497). Several other expulsions took place, too, in smaller localities. King of Naples Charles II, expelling Jews from his French counties of Anjou and Maine in 1289, even provided for the ‘citizen's arrest' of any Jew discovered in hiding, who would be ‘properly beaten without the inflicting of wounds'.^[944] Expulsions could be unintentionally temporary, as in the repeated permissions for Jews to return to parts of France after the 1306 expulsion. (There were indeed Jews like Baruch living in Toulouse to be attacked by the Pastoureaux in 1320.)^[945] These expulsions often seem influ­enced by rulers having reached their limits in financially exploiting the Jews, although this is not satisfying as a sole reason. Here too we have multiple coexisting motivations, both immediate circumstances and the result of centuries of a Christian universalism that had slowly squeezed out space for Jews in Christian polities. Expulsions were a statement that the traditional models of tolerance and protection for Jews no longer applied. By the later Middle Ages, many medieval Latin Christians no longer believed that their Jewish neighbours were the ‘same' Jews for whom Augustine had urged toleration (even if, ironically, tales of ritual murder still cited collective guilt in the crucifixion).

Christian violence against Jews was irregular, disparate, of different origins and actors, and governed by contingency and circumstance. It was morbidly creative and adaptive: when Joao II permitted Spanish Jews to enter Portugal at a price in 1492, he forcibly sent their children to the newly colonised, but underpopulated, Atlantic island of Sao Tome. At the same time, and despite immediate moments of peace and security, a bird's-eye view of anti-Jewish violence in the Middle Ages shows it to have worsened and quickened as centuries passed. This change had much to do with the growth of the medieval state. But it was also tightly bound to the development of ‘Christendom' as a politico-religious, global entity with the pope at its head, and to a theology of radical inclusion and transcendent violence. Christian depictions in diverse media insisted that Jews were instigators, not victims, of bodily violence, with Christian violence as salutary revenge or justice. The experiences of anti-Jewish violence were themselves offered as proof: through ‘confessions' and through plaints that Jews escaped the ‘justice' of violence through bribery. Each supposed instance of Jewish violence and greed was layered upon its predecessors and gestured to the moment of the crucifixion. As Heinrich von Diessenhofen reported, the death of the Jews sent them ‘to hell', and in it ‘the curse seemed to be fulfilled: ‘his blood be upon us and upon our children'.^[946] Christian violence was folded into divine violence and divine justice.