Jews and Christians Imagining Other

Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe
Author(s): IVAN G. MARCUS

Source: Prooftexts, Vol. 15, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 1995), pp. 209-226
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689425
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IVANG. MARCUS
Jews and Christians Imagining theOther

inMedieval Europe
THE JEWSOF MEDIEVAL EUROPE as well as theChristianmajority

among whom a dramatic cultural revival from the
they lived experienced
late eleventh through the early thirteenth centuries.1 An important
dimension of that revival was a new awareness on the part of Jews and
Christians of members of the other culture. Far from being isolated, as
was
imagined inmuch nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish histo
riography, the Jews who lived in the growing towns of Christian Europe
encountered Christians every day in the street, themarketplace, and even
in one another's houses.2 Hebrew and Latin narratives from the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries permit us to see how representative
writers of each community viewed the presence of the other. In addition,
we can sometimes see a cultural mirroring, that is, how members of one
culture thought members of the other looked back at them.3
dramatic encounters between Jews and Christians are
Although
in the few extended narratives thatwere produced inAshkenaz,
depicted
the short narrative form of the exemplum (Hebrew: ma'aseh) is a genre
that especially lends itself to studying how writers in each culture
the other. Unlike the parable or animal fable, exempla are not
imagined
moralistic tales but also claim to be based on historical events.
only They
often mention known individuals and places and portray miniature
dramas in which protagonists from everyday life engage in different
forms of conflict and confrontation. Precisely because these stories are
made up of credible contextual elements and incorporate personalities
and themes familiar to thewriter's audience, exempla became significant
PROOFTEXTS 15 (1995):209-226 ? 1995by The JohnsHopkins UniversityPress
210 IVANG. MARCUS
vehicles for portraying how Jews and Christians imagined encountering

the other.4
An outstanding example of a Jewish perspective on Christian culture
is an in Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn's narrative,
episode/exemplum Sefer
zekhirah (Book of Remembrance), which he wrote inGermany in the third
quarter of the twelfth century.5 An important indication of how Christian
writers imagined contemporary Jews is the moralistic tales about Jews
written by the Rhenish monk Caesarius of Heisterbach around 1220 in his
Dial?gus miraculorum (Dialogue on Miracles).6
A close reading of Rabbi Ephraim's story will also suggest an
important aspect of what I would call premodern or inward Jewish
acculturation inmedieval Ashkenaz. The more familiar modern or out
ward acculturation refers to the blurring of individual or communal
traditions, Jewish identities, and religious and cultural boundaries that
has occurred in the past two centuries. In contrast, inward acculturation
refers to premodern cases, be it in the ancient Near East, the Greco
Roman world, Muslim societies, Latin or Eastern Christendom, or Renais
sance Italy,when Jews who did not assimilate or convert to the
majority
culture retained an unequivocal Jewish identity. Nevertheless, within a
traditional Jewish framework, the writings of the articulate few or the
customs of the ordinary many sometimes expressed elements of their
Jewish religious cultural identity by internalizing and transforming var
ious genres, motifs, terms, institutions, or rituals of themajority culture in
a polemical,
parodie, or neutralized manner.7
Rabbi Ephraim's ma'aseh illustrates how a Jewish writer used Chris
tian symbols and images, including the Passion, to construct a positive
Jewish self-image in which Rabbi Jacob ben Meir of Ramerupt, the
talmudic Tosafist master known as "Rabbenu Tarn," becomes a Jewish
Christ figure. By subjecting such narratives to a close reading, we can
understand better the cultural significance of exempla that appear to be
failed efforts at historical reportage. Instead they can be shown to be
an
carefully written literary texts that sometimes articulate unexpectedly
high degree of Jewish inward acculturation, that is, an of
appropriation
Christian motifs that the Jewish writer used to craft an anti-Christian
cultural polemic.8
Compared to the self-assertive posture of the Jewish narrators of
Hebrew accounts of the First Crusade anti-Jewish riots of 1096, a more
ambivalent picture emerges in certain elaborate narratives from the later
part of the twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries. Superimposed upon
the attitude of contempt some Jewish writers expressed in the parodie
and mocking language of Toledot Yeshu (Life of Jesus) about Christian
sancta, and the hatred some Christians still articulated about the Jews
Jews and Christians inMedieval Europe 211
"among us" as deserving of death during Crusades, there are signs that
other Christians thought Jews could be reasoned with and even attracted
to Christianity. In addition, we find evidence that young Christian men
and Jewish women, in particular, were attracted to one another.9
The possibility of Jews and Christians being attracted to the other
culture is an expression of the great cultural and social transformation of
the twelfth century and is related to the subject of the "individual in the
twelfth century." As Carolyn Bynum has observed, this phenomenon was
not about the autonomous individual but about how people could now
choose among different group identities. For example, Christians who
wanted to become monks could now join several new orders in addition
to a Benedictine house; and Jews could become Pietists or non-Pietists,
mystics or Tosafists in newly conscious ways. One of the new options
and Jews in the twelfth century was an
confronting both Christians
attraction to the other's religious culture. One of the weapons Jewish
defenders of the faith, like R. Ephraim of Bonn, had at their disposal, was
a Jewish awareness of the symbols of Christianity.10
Placed within the context of the events surrounding the call for a
Second Crusade in Europe, a short episode/macaseh inRabbi Ephraim of
Bonn's Sefer zekhirah illustrates how Jews imagined the way Christians
looked at them. According to Ephraim, Christians thought even Jewish
leaders were ambivalent about their Judaism and were vulnerable to
being persuaded to become Christians. Moreover, the images Ephraim

uses to describe his Jewish protagonist reveals the influence of Christian
imagery on his "grammar of perception," that is, the categories that
helped Jews?or Christians?make sense of the world.11 When he por
a Christian
trays his Jewish subject in confrontation with antagonist,
Ephraim adapts Christian images but transforms them into a Jewish
perspective.
In his extended narrative about the Second Crusade, Ephraim relates
that a monk named Radolph was preaching revenge on the Jews in
Germany for the Passion, in the spirit of the crusader ideology of 1096.
He also knows that the great churchman Bernard of Clairvaux checked
that violence by opposing Radolph, and he even cites Ps. 59:12, which was
one of the prooftexts Bernard cited in his letters opposing Radolph's
behavior: "Do not kill them lestmy people be unmindful;with Your
power make wanderers of them; bring them low, O our shield, the Lord."
But although Ephraim mentions the verse, he is still not sure about
Bernard's motives. He knows that secular authorities required bribes "as
ransom for our lives," but he is somewhat baffled about Bernard's
212 IVANG. MARCUS
motives "we have not inquired whether he was

and writes receiving
payment for on behalf of [the Jews]."12
speaking
In the course of discussing selected events that occurred in 1146,when
he reports he had been thirteen years old, Ephraim tells a story about the
great northern French rabbinical authority, Rabbi Jacob ben Meir of
Ramerupt, who died in 1171. This is "Rabbenu Tarn," literally, "our master
the plain or pure one," a nickname based on the biblical Jacob's being
called ish tarn,"a plain man" (Gen. 25:27). Although the exemplum may
be based on a factual encounter, its formulation suggests much more. It
as follows:
begins
On the second festival day of Shavuot [Pentecost], French crusaders gathered

at Rameru[pt], and they came to thehouse of ourMaster Rabbi Jacob,may he
live, and took all thatwas in his house. They ripped up a Torah scroll before
his face and took him out to a field. There they argued with him about his
religion and started to assault him viciously. They inflicted five wounds on
his head, saying: "You are the leader of the Jews. So we shall take vengeance
upon you for the crucified one and wound you theway you inflicted the five
wounds on our
god."13
Although the crusader motive of revenge for the crucifixion is com

mon to the Hebrew narratives of 1096 and to Ephraim's Sefer zekhirah,
the systematic decimation of the communities of German Jewry and
dozens of ritual killings and suicides did not occur in 1146/47 as they had
in 1096. Ephraim condenses much of the action into a few episodes, one of
which is the ma'aseh about a conflict between Rabbi Jacob, a single
representative Jewish figure, and a few Christian attackers. By presenting
a ritual attack on Rabbenu Tarn as an act of revenge for the ancient Jews'
crucifixion of Jesus, the narrator equates what the Christians are acting
out upon Rabbi Jacob now with what they say the Jews did to Jesus in the
past. This association in the story of Rabbi Jacob with Jesus is reinforced
when the Christians refer to Rabbi Jacob as "the leader of the Jews"
shel an echo of Jesus' mock title,
(gedolan yisrtfel), "king of the Jews."14
Within the Jewish narrative, Rabbenu Tarn oscillates between being
as the leader of northern French as a Jewish
portrayed Jewry and
substitute Christ figure.
Ephraim proceeds to contrast Christianity to Torah, which the Chris
tians understand tomean the Torah scroll. The ripping of Torah scrolls is
also described repeatedly in the Hebrew narratives about 1096 and is a
material and symbolic attack on Judaism understood as a biblical religion.
The act is at least as old as 1Maccabees (1:56-57), where it ismentioned in
the account of the despoiling of Jerusalem. The targeting of specific
Jewish ritual objects offers a Jewish-Christian parallel to what Natalie

Zemon Davis called the "rites of violence" in her study of Protestant and
Catholic riots and their "social polemical" acting out in sixteenth-century
France.15
The Christians also attack themaster of talmudic dialectic, the epit

ome of Judaism in twelfth-century France based not on theHebrew Bible
alone but on the Talmud. Ironically, there is no sign that the Christians
understand anything about Rabbi Jacob's rabbinic learning. They view
him simply as the leader of the Jews. As such, he is viewed as an
appropriate quid pro quo for Jesus as victim. Apart from such figures as
Peter the Venerable, who mentions the term "Talmut" from second-hand
accounts for the first time, very few Christian writers in the twelfth
century understood that the dialectical study of the Talmud was becom
ing the basis of Jewish study.16
To be sure, the Augustinian witness theory held that Jews had a
legitimate place in Christendom because they were preservers of, and
witnesses to, the truth in the Old Testament as the basis of their faith.17
And although rabbinic Judaism had always been something different
from bibical religion, Christian writers grasped the importance of the
Talmud only in the thirteenth century, as in Paris, when itwas burned in
the 1240s.
The Christian understanding that Judaism is symbolically associated
with the Torah scroll of the Old Testament is often reflected iconograph
a Jew is contrasted to a Christian who holds a book or codex
ically when
of theNew Testament. For example, on the portal of the south fa?ade of
Chartres Cathedral, Saint Jerome holds the codex over an unrolled scroll
and stands on top of a crouching blindfolded synagoga depiction of the
Jew who holds part of the scroll. And in an illumination in a Bible
Moralis?e, also from thirteenth-century France, now in the Bodleian
a
Library, monks hold out the codex to group of Jews who turn away
carrying the unrolled Torah scroll.18
Although the crusaders tear up the Torah scroll in Rabbi Jacob's
house, they ritually attack him in the field. The contrast between the
house of Jacob or Torah and violence in the field plays on the biblical and
rabbinic contrast between Jacob versus Esau, Jew versus Christian, and
the Torah versus violence. Rabbenu Tarn's name, after all, is Jacob, whose
namesake inGen. 25:27 is not only called ish tarnor "plain man," but also
yoshev ohalim, "one who dwells in tents," that is, stays at home, in contrast
to Esau, who is called ish sadeh, a man of the field, a hunter. In midrash
Bereshit Rabbah, "the tents of Jacob" are glossed as "academies of Torah"
and Jacob's description as tarn,now understood as "plain" or "simple," is
defined as the absence of the violent qualities ascribed to Esau.19
214 IVANG. MARCUS
In the field, the Christians who had attacked the Torah scroll
now with him about and started
"argued his religion assaulting him
viciously." Although persuasion and reasoned discourse are mentioned,
the focus of the story is on the ritual attack on Rabbenu Tarn's head,
which they wound. Rabbi Jacob, the teacher of Torah, suffers wounds
meant to correspond to those made by Jesus' crown of thorns. Once again,
the image in the Hebrew text is of Jacob, and the epithet tarn is now
understood as in the beginning of Job,who is called tarnveyashar (Job 1:1),
a coincidence
"pure" or "innocent and righteous." It is not that Rabbenu
Tarn's book of responsa was called Sefer hayashar (Book of the Righteous),
thereby echoing the phrase tarnveyashar applied to Job and, by extension,
to the patriarch Jacob as ish tarn in Genesis 25.20
Although the Christians say that they are exacting revenge on Rabbi
Jacob by imposing on him the stigmata that Christians claimed the Jews
had imposed on Jesus during the crucifixion, Ephraim considers the
Christian perpetrators, to be of an innocent
ironically, guilty attacking
"head of the Jews," even as they had accused the Jews of killing the
innocent Jesus. The name Jacob implies the patriarch's second name,
Israel, and by extension, Rabbi Jacob represents the entire Jewish people,
the children of Israel (benei yisra'el), as the beloved of God who suffers, as
a collective Jewish Christ
figure.
The story continues with a divinely appointed Christian nobleman
who rescues Jacob. To emphasize God's miraculous intervention to save
his Torah scholar, Ephraim uses the language of the Book of Jonah and
writes: "And the Lord appointed a great nobleman for our Rabbi Jacob"
a
(vayman YHWH sargadol lerabbenu ya'aqov), close adaptation of the verse
"And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah" (vayman YHWH
dag gadol livloac et yonah) (Jon. 2:1). As soon as the Christian nobleman
appears, as much a deus ex machina as the big fish,Rabbi Jacob calls to him
and offers to give him a horse worth five coins if he will persuade the
attackers to leave him alone. The nobleman assures the Christians: "I will
speak to [Rabbi Jacob]. Perhaps he will be tempted, and we shall succeed in
swaying him," and the nobleman promises to hand Rabbenu Tarn back to
them the next day if the nobleman fails to persuade him to accept
Christianity.
The words Ephraim puts into the nobleman's mouth are significant.
What would make a Jewish writer portray a Christian leader as imagining
that the leading rabbinic figure in northern France was susceptible to the
temptation to convert to Christianity? How did Ephraim conceive of this
a
possibility occurring to Christian? To be sure, the narratives of 1096 refer
to some Jews being forcibly converted, at least temporarily, but not
to being tempted to do so voluntarily.21 By the mid-twelfth century,
however, Jews knew that Christians were attempting towear them down
in private encounters. Thus, in Sefer hasidim (Book of the Pietists), from

late twelfth-century Germany, Rabbi Judah the Pietist cautions his
readers:
. .
Suppose a monk or a priest. approaches a [Jewish] Pietist... to debate
about theTorah_Even ifyou aremore learned thanhe, do not permit a less
learned person to overhear your debates [vikuhin].The other person might be
persuaded [by your Christian opponent], since he does not understand
[which position is] the true one.22
The nobleman's assumption, "perhaps he will be tempted" to con

vert, is a theme that also appears in another ma'aseh from the second half
of twelfth-century Germany, and it is also attributed to Ephraim of Bonn.
It is not about a historical figure like Rabbenu Tarn but about an imagi
nary Rabbi Amnon ofMainz, whom the narrator refers to, somewhat like
Rabbenu Tarn, as gedol hador, "the leading Jew of his time." Repeatedly,
the local bishop tries to persuade Rabbi Amnon to convert toChristianity.
Finally, exhausted by these attempts, Amnon permits himself to tell the
bishop, "give me three days and I will let you know." The protagonist
immediately realizes that his hesitation implies his doubt about Judaism
and thathe has signaled to the bishop thathe might be tempted to
become a Christian. He thereupon ismartyred in a very brutal manner as
a sacrifice.23
In the narrative about Amnon, which ironically means "faithful one,"
we an a as a martyr in
have imaginary story that presents single Jew
conflict with a representative of the Christian establishment, a bishop
who wants to convert him. But it is not entirely imaginary. The motif of
waiting three days is significant. To be sure, it echoes the Book of Esther,
"do not eat or drink for three days" (Esther 4:16), after the king issues the
decree to kill all the Jews. But thismotif is also part of the Christian legal
tradition inmedieval Germany and is directly related, as is the Amnon
story, to a Jew facing pressure to convert toChristianity. In the community
charters issued by Emperor Henry IV to the Jews ofWorms in 1090 and
confirmed by Frederick Barbarossa in 1157 to the Jews of the empire, a
provision ismade in favor of the Jews not being forced to be baptized as
follows:
No one shall presume to baptize their sons or daughters against theirwill

If certain of themwish freely to be baptized, they shall be held threedays, so
that it be clearly known if indeed they repudiate their law because of the
Christian faithor by virtue of some injury they have suffered.24
a
But Amnon's story reflects a social reality in more profound sense
as well. It suggests that some Jews were in greater social contact with
Christians than ever before and were occasionally being attracted to
216 IVANG. MARCUS
Christianity or at least were worrying that theymight appear to be. It also

reflects a growing Christian awareness in the late twelfth century that
some Jews were ambivalent about their loyalty to Judaism and might be
attracted to Christianity.
In 1115,Abbot Guibert de Nogent remarked that for "a man of Jewish
our
origin" to convert to Christianity "in days is unusual." A few years
a
later, thirteen-year-old Jew named Judah ben David Halevi of Cologne
had a dream that the emperor brought him to his palace and gave
him many gifts. In his Latin autobiography, he reports that he was
baptized in 1129 and took the name Hermannus, and became a member
and eventually the abbot of the Premonstratensian cloister in Scheda, in
Westphalia.25
By themid- to late twelfth century, in addition toHermannus, there is
anecdotal of many more
evidence converts. For example, in one of
Rabbenu Tarn's responsa, he mentions that "more than twenty bills of
divorce were prepared in Paris and France" for the Jewish wives ofmen
who converted toChristianity. He even tells us that the Jewsmocked their
former coreligionists' names, by calling someone named
old Hebrew
or
Menahem "Melahem" (the adversary) calling Avraham "Avran,"
which sounds like theword for "sinner" (cavaryan) and that Jews refused
to use the apostates' new German or French names.26
we do not know how old these Jewish men were when
Although they
converted, Hermannus's autobiography indicates that he was only thir
teen when he had his dream. The late Bernhard Blumenkranz suggested
that itwas the early death of Judah's mother, his father's remarriage, and
his adolescent struggle that contributed to his openness to conversion.27
It is interesting to note that adolescence may have been a factor in
other cases of Jewish attraction and even conversion to Christianity,28 as
we will see in a moment. But beyond this psychological explanation, the
expresses a restlessness that is also found in other
autobiography spiritual
Christian and Jewish circles in the twelfth century. In this climate, itwas
conceivable that Christians might expect to convince even a Rabbenu Tarn
to become a Christian.
The storyinwhich Rabbi Jacobbecomes a JewishChrist figureisnot
an isolated of Jewish inward acculturative and
example adaptation
into a Jewish
polemical transformation of Christian images argument. It is
also found at the end of the Amnon story, where Ephraim reports that
after Amnon died and was transported to heaven, he revealed himself in
a dream three days later to the leader ofMainz Jewry,whom he commis
sions to teach a special liturgical poem throughout the Diaspora as a
witness and memorial toAmnon, an allusion to Jesus' commission to the
a we will also see how
apostles, three days after the Passion.29 In moment,
Jews were aware of the new of the Eucharist and absorbed
significance
a
aspects of that rite into Jewish custom and ritual celebration, again, in
that for Judaism's truth but thatwas expressed in the
refiguration argued
"grammar of perception" of Christian symbols.
I turn now to a complementary Christian case to illustrate the way

a Christian writer imagined Jews looked at Christianity. The moralistic
tales or exempla in Caesarius of Heisterbach's (ob. ca. 1240) Dial?gus
miraculorum are an important source for understanding Christian percep
tions of Jews inmedieval Europe and of Jewish-Christian cultural interac
tions, including how Christians imagined Jews looked at Christianity.
Caesarius was a Cistercian monk and wrote his book around 1220 in
twelve parts in the form of a dialogue between a monk and a novice. In it
he explains the basic doctrines of Christianity and illustrates them with
hundreds of exempla.
Several exempla in the Dial?gus miraculorum mention Jews. In some
tales, Caesarius refers to Jews in a social setting, such as "Jacob the Jew,
the bishop of the Jews" (XI:44) or places an incident "near the Jewish
an awareness of
cemetery" outside the town (V:19). In others, he suggests
Jewish beliefs and cultural assumptions, as when he mentions that Jews
believe that there is an angel who kills all who die and that death is
a man with a scythe ("an angel by whom the
represented in the form of
whole human race is slain") (XI:61). Or he alludes to a Jewish concern
about messianism when he says that on seeing a brilliant star after sunset,
"the Jews declare itwas the sign of the coming of theirMessiah" (X:26).
Caesarius alludes to Christian attitudes toward Jews as well. Some
are instances of well-known images of the Jew as usurer (e.g., VIIL46) or
as an embodiment of pride (VIL42). More an exemplum in
revealing is
which a Jew is described as and to the truth of a
witnessing testifying
Christian miracle (X:19). In a church from attack, those inside
defending
a But instead
set up "a wooden image of the crucified in certain window."
of deterring the attack, someone shot and wounded "the sacred image
deep in the
arm. At once in a wonderful way the miracles of old are
renewed and blood begins to drip from the place of thewound, as if from
human veins." At a later time, the local lord abbot visits the site and is
told about this miracle and inquires if it is true. "And," Caesarius
continues, "when the account I have given above was told to him by
everyone, a Jew who happened to be present drew the abbot aside and
said: 'Verily,my lord, you have heard the truth.'As he (the abbot) toldme,
he was much more pleased with the testimony of an enemy."
But by far themost interesting are those few elaborate exempla that
describe dramatic interactions between Jews and Christians, both individ
are important not so much for any
ually and in community. These stories
218 IVANG. MARCUS
historical events to which they may or may not refer outside the narra
tives, as itwere, but for theways Jews are imagined and portrayed from a
specific Christian perspective in the stories themselves. They reflect
Christian understandings not only ofwhat could take place in real lifebut
also the cultural meanings of those imagined events for their author and
potential listeners and readers. Despite the literary and imagined quali
ties of these narratives, they are placed into a historical setting that was
real and that set limits to the cultural imagination that invented or
reshaped and adapted them. From a of these sources, we may be
reading
able to infer something about the cultural setting in which such stories
could be created and also how the narrator and reader of such a tale
thoughtabout theworld inwhich Jewslived side by sidewithmembers
of the faithful.
In BookII, on the power of contrition (de contritione), he introduces
four exempla about Jews and Christians in chapters 23-26. All four are
women or
about young Jewish girls being attracted to Christianity or to
young Christian clerics or to both. Two are about young Jewish women
and clerics having sexual relations that eventually lead to the woman's
conversion or downfall (11:23-24); one is about a Jewish girl who over
hears a conversation in her house between her father and a visiting
Christian and becomes attracted to Christianity (11:25), a motif that
reminds us of thewarning in Sefer hasidim about not letting unprepared
Jews listen in on religious debates between Pietist Jews and Christians;
and a fourth is also about a Jewish girl who is attracted to Christianity
(11:26).
In the course of developing the sexual plot in the first two stories,
Caesarius uses certain stock observations that reflect cultural stereotypes.
Especially prominent is the motif that the Jewish girls are particularly
beautiful. For example, 11:23 opens with the generalization: "In a city of
there lived the daughter of a Jew who, likemany of her race, was
England
a very beautiful And thismotif appears again in 11:24: "In the city, I
girl."
think, ofWorms, there lived a Jew,who had a beautiful daughter." This
idea serves in part to exculpate the Christian male's attraction to and sin
with her, but it also reflects the cultural stereotype of the attractive Jewish
woman as the cultural "other." Caesarius is aware that Christian clerics
and young Jewish women were attracted to each other. Moreover, the
authority figures in each culture, represented as ecclesiastical officials or
the girls' fathers, had to try to keep their charges within their respective
families and cultures. The centrality of these themes suggests the per
meability of the boundaries between the two religious cultures.
The exemplum in 11:23will serve as a case in point. It is headed by the
rubric: "Of a [cleric] who debauched a Jewish maiden, and how the Jews
were struck dumb in the Cathedral, when they tried to accuse the
offender who was now contrite/' This story about themoral downfall and
eventual Christian redemption of a cleric charts not only the personal
liaison of one Christian, who ismale, with one Jew,who is female; it also
a confrontation between symbolic images of each religious culture
depicts
as they interact with members
represented as two individuals of each
religious community.
The actsbegin in theprivacyof thebedroombut veryquicklybecome
more than the immediate didactic context
public acts and illustrate much
in Caesarius's book of how contrition works. Thus, in 11:23 the male is
described not only as a young cleric but also as the nephew of the bishop
of London, a public figure. Moreover, the sin occurs on the night of Good
Friday, when the Christian community is celebrating and acting out the
events leading to the Passion. The Jewish girl explains this artificial
within the as follows: "I am very dear to my father,who
timing story
watches over me so carefully that neither can I come to you or you tome,
unless itbe on the night of the Friday before your Easter." And Caesarius
the reason for this moment of opportunity in the Christian
supplies
calendar year: "For then the Jews are said to labor under a sickness called
the bloody flux, with which they are so much occupied, that they can
scarcely pay attention

to anything else at that time." Implicit in this
is the idea that Jews are afflicted annually with a blood flow
explanation
tomark the Passion when their ancestors afflicted Christ with stigmata.30
We recall the other tale in which a Jew witnesses to the truth of a
miraculously bleeding wooden crucified Jesus.

The cleric, Caesarius notes, "being almost beside himself with excess
of desire, forgot his Christianity, forgot the Passion of his Lord, and on
that very night came to themaiden and spent thewhole night with her till
morning." The Jewish woman's father discovers the two of them in bed
and is angry enough to kill him: "What do you do here, you vile
Christian? Where is your honor or your religion? You are delivered into
my hands by the just judgmentofGod, and Iwould kill you now likea
dog,31 if Iwere not afraid of my lord the bishop."
Remembering that the cleric is related to the bishop, the father
restrains himself out of fear. The next day, Good Friday, the Jews enter the
church in themiddle of the service. Before any confrontation occurs, we
are told that the cleric prays and demonstrates complete contrition. "The
most merciful Creator, who hates sin, but loves the sinner, as soon as He
saw his contrition, turned the dreaded confusion on to the heads of the
unbelievers."
Because of the cleric's contrition, the Jews become mute and are not
able to accuse the cleric in front of the bishop. "They pressed nearer to
[the bishop], but as soon as they opened theirmouths to accuse the cleric,
none could utter a single word. The
they found their voices gone, and
220 IVANG. MARCUS
no sound
bishop, seeing themouths of the Jews gaping wide at him and
had come there simply tomock at the
coming from them, thought they
holy mysteries, and indignantly ordered them all to be driven out of the
church."
Implied in the dramatic confrontation between the bishop and the

Jews, set in the church on Good Friday, is a potential reenactment of the
a
original Passion. From Christian perspective, the Jewish mob is about to
attack an innocent Christian Christ figure, the young Christian man
whose contrition makes him blameless and pure. Contrast this to the
Jewish image in Ephraim's Hebrew narrative that pictures Christian
attackers placing the stigmata on the head of an innocent Rabbenu Tarn.
In Caesarius's narrative, when the bishop sees the Jews standing
there with their mouths open, he assumes that they are mocking the
service, that is, mocking then and there the Eucharist, which itself
reenacts the Passion that is being remembered that very day. The image of
Jews mocking the Passion was more than a figment of Caesarius's
imagination. Canon 68 of the then recently held Fourth Lateran Council in
1215 triedto curb just such behavior by legislating:
Moreover, [Jews] shall not walk out inpublic on theDays of Lamentation [i.e.,
the last three days ofHoly Week] or on the Sunday of Easter; for as we have
heard, certain ones among them... do not fear to poke fun at Christians who
display signs of grief at thememory of themost holy Passion.32
The Jews' gaping mouths seem tomock the faithful Christians' open
mouths as they are about to receive the consecrated wafer, and a negative
Hebrew biblical motif can now be applied to the Jews, as in Ps. 115:4-5:
"Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have
mouths, but cannot speak" (parallel in Ps. 135:16). Caesarius portrays the
Jews as mocking but foolish, including the young woman's father,who is
now rendered mute and powerless.
In the end, "the bishop ... urged and persuaded [the cleric] tomarry
this whom he had ruined, as soon as she should be born
lawfully girl
was a man both merciful and just,
again in the grace of baptism; for he
and preferred that his young relative should lose all hope of ecclesiastical
preferment, than that the girl should be exposed to peril by remaining in
her father's sins." Eventually both enter the Cistercian Order. Caesarius
then summarizes the power of Christian contrition: "by it the lapsed was
restored, the Jews were put to silence, and an infidel woman was brought
to the Faith."
Note that Caesarius assumes that Christians thought Jews under
stood what went on in church and that Jews mocked the liturgy con
sciously. And there is at least anecdotal evidence fromHebrew and other
Latin sources that suggests that Jews were aware of Christian worship in
general and of the eucharistie sacrifice in particular. Thus, in a late

thirteenth-century Hebrew source from France, Rabbi Isaac of Corbeil
(ob. 1280) criticizes Jews there for raucous behavior in the synagogue, in
contrast to Christians, who are silent in church: "We should apply to
ourselves an a fortiori argument from the [behavior of the] idolators
They do not believe [inGod] but stand likemutes [!] in the

[Christians].
house of their shame [church]. How much themore should we [act that
way], we who stand before the King of the King of Kings, the Holy One,
blessed be He."33
Evidence of a Jewish awareness of the eucharistie sacrifice may be
inferred, for example, from a twelfth-century gloss on the Talmud from
northern France that refers toChristian worship as midei detiqrovet (sacrifi
cial objects), an ancient term apparently used now to include the elements
of the Eucharist.34 In his letter to the archbishop of Sens and to the bishop
of Paris, in 1205, Pope Innocent III complains that Jews force their
Christian wet nurses to spill out theirmilk into a latrine for three days
after they have gone toMass.35 In an unusual case from Bristol, England,
in 1265, several Jews were excommunicated by ecclesiastical authorities
because they "were guilty of iniquitous insults, blasphemies, and injuries
and of an assault upon a chaplain . . .who had administered the holy
Eucharist to a sick person in the Jewry."36 And in the early fourteenth
century, a Jewish apostate who reverted to Judaism testified in a French
inquisitorial court that Christians eat their God (christiani comedunt Deum
suum).37
A Jewish awareness of the newly important eucharistie wafer is
in a new Jewish children's
obliquely reflected initiatory rite of passage,
from the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, inwhich small boys
were brought to a Hebrew teacher and given cakes to eat baked with milk
and honey and on which Hebrew alphabets and Torah phrases were
inscribed. The similarity of Christians eating a wafer as the body of God
who is associated in the Book of Revelations with the Greek alphabet?"I
am the alpha and the (Rev. 1:8, 21:6, 22:13)?and a Jewish child
omega"
eating alphabet Torah cakes in order to be initiated into Torah study is
highly suggestive.38
Further evidence of a Jewish awareness of Christian symbols related
to this initiation ceremony is found in an illumination of the ceremony in
the Leipzig mahzor, produced in Germany around 1320. There the artist
portrays the father carrying the boy in his arms as he is about to offer him
to the teacher. The child caresses
the father's cheek, which is an image, as
Evelyn Cohen has shown, borrowed from theMadonna-and-Child-type
known as madonna amabilis (Madonna deserving of love). Moreover, the
Jewish child seated on the Hebrew teacher's lap on a chair is also an
adaptation of the Madonna as the Throne of Wisdom. And the idea,
222 IVANG. MARCUS
expressed in the Hebrew texts that accompany the initiation ceremony,

referring to the father's sacrificing his child to Torah study, echoes t?bie
strong image from the late twelfth century on, of imagining the Eucharist
as the Christ Child who is elevated and sacrificed in theMass.39
In addition to Caesarius's impression that Jews consciously mock the
Eucharist, the body of God, he also makes the point that young Jewish
women use their physical beauty to lure Christian clerics. The theme of
the relationships between Jewish women and Christian men requires
further investigation. To be tested are such observations as JohnMundy's,
that these exempla describe "Jewish girls wishing tomarry Christian boys
or to have them as lovers." We should recall that in 1171,Count Thibault of
Blois was involved with a Jewish woman named Polcelina during an
episode inwhich
a Jew was accused of killing a Christian and throwing
the body into the river. Or again, the Council of Canterbury, held at
Oxford in 1222, condemned to death a deacon who had converted to
Judaism over a Jewish woman.40
The relationship between Jewish fathers and daughters, a motif also
found in the other exempla, suggests that Jewish power was being
challenged not only politically in the thirteenth century but domestically
as well. And the notion of adolescence as a time of
vulnerability toward
conversion for Jewish and Christian men and women needs to be studied
further. Taking an ecclesiastical, especially
a monastic
perspective,
Caesarius decries any efforts by Christians to enforce standards of justice
if it benefits a Jewish father and jeopardizes a
newly converted Jewish
woman. In this regard, the age of adolescence of the Jewish girls who
convert should be compared to Hermannus Judaeus and other Jewish
males who converted in their early teens. In Caesarius's narratives about
young girls, the fathers are checked by ecclesiastical authority and are
nearly powerless. The motif of generational struggle experienced during
years of adolescence is exploited in these narratives about Jewish
Christian struggles within Jewish families.
These Hebrew narratives and Latin exempla, then, reveal a great deal
about the twelfth-century revival inmedieval Europe. Although we have
at a few there are a
looked only examples, signs of progression. Symbol
ically, the Jews' relationship to the crucifixion and the Passion undergoes
significant changes. According to the crusaders in 1096, the Jews should

be killed out of revenge for the Passion. By the mid-twelfth century,
and patience are more dominant, as seen in Ephraim's story
persuasion
about Rabbi Jacob Tarn, and in Bernard of Clairvaux's letters written in
opposition to Radolph. Instead of killing Rabbi Jacob, the crusaders in
1146 settle for ritually wounding him, the "head of the Jews." By the time
of the Fourth Lateran Council, which stipulated in 1215 that every
Christian should receive the Eucharist at least once a year, Caesarius of
Heisterbach pictures the Jewsmocking it, the new reality of the Passion in
late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Europe.
A second progression parallels the first. The structured boundaries in
the images of pure and impure, deicide and mockery persist, but in the
twelfth century we also see a new hint of openness across the religious
divide. There are occasional
conversions to Christianity and even to
Judaism, especially during the individuals' teenage years. As social
contact increased, opportunities arose for Jews and Christians to talk to
one another about religion, and sometimes the other side won. The pull
over the religious boundaries could be verbal or sexual, as in Caesarius's
exempla, or the illusion that words could lure a Rabbenu Tarn to Chris
In either case, the new cultural choices that emerged in the
tianity.
religious revival of the twelfth century closely implicated Jews and
Christians with one another.
Yet thiswas to be a brief transition from early medieval indifference
to the later medieval Christian mission to the Jews, mendicant pressure,
state intervention, and eventual expulsion. As events during the thir
teenth century were to prove, therewould eventually be no place inmuch
of Latin Christendom for the Jewish minority. During the revival of the
twelfth century, however, Jews and Christians could still imagine almost
endless possibilities about the other.
Departments of History and Religious Studies

Yale University
NOTES
1. For the general see Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds.,
phenomenon,
Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
2. A major pioneering study of Jewish-Christian cultural contacts in northern Europe,
including the observation that medieval Jews were familiar with Christian doctrines, is
Moritz G?demann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Culture der abendl?ndischen Juden
(3 vols.; 1880-88; reprinted, Amsterdam, 1966). See, for example, vol. 1:6-8 and 19. For
abundant evidence that some Jews in medieval Germany knew the New Testament and
Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, see David Berger, ed. and trans., The Jewish
ChristianDebate in theHighMiddle Ages: A CriticalEditionof theNizzahon Vetus (Phila
a reassessment of the earlier consensus, see, for example,
delphia, 1979). For signs of Gerson
D. Cohen, "Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim," inMax Kreuzberger, ed.,
Studiesof theLeo BaeckInstitute(NewYork, 1967),pp. 3-42, especiallyp. 38; RobertChazan,
n. 109; Ivan
European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 131-36,193-96,323-24,
G. Marcus, "From Politics toMartyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in theHebrew Narratives of
2 (1982):40-52; Jeremy
the1096Crusade Riots," Prooftexts Cohen, "The 1096 Persecution
Narratives'?the Events and the Libels: Stories in Their Social-Cultural
Martyrological
Contexts" [Hebrew], Zion 59 (1994): 169-208; Evelyn M. Cohen, "The Teacher, the Father,
224 IVANG. MARCUS
and theVirginMary in theLeipzig

Mahzor," Proceedingsof theTenth
WorldCongressofJewish
Studies Division D, vol. 2, Art, Folklore and Music (Jerusalem, 1990): 71-76; Marc Michael
'The and the Law: The Medieval Jewish Minority a Christian
Epstein, Elephant Adapts
Motif," Art Bulletin76 (1993): 465-78; and Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood:Jewish
Acculturation inMedieval
Europe (New Haven, forthcoming), among others.
3. For a modelof this kind of analysis, see Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy,
trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 1-15. Compare David Stern, introduction to
Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, ed. David Stern and
Mirsky (Philadelphia,1990),pp. 17-19and 121-42.

Mark Jay
4. On the historical claims of the maâseh, see David Stern, Parables inMidrash: Narrative
and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 13-16. For other genres of
medieval Hebrew narratives, see haHvri bimei habenayim (Jerusalem,
Joseph Dan, Hasippur
1975). On exempla in Latin literature, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1973), pp. 57-61; Claude Bremond and
Le Goff, V'exemplum" (Turnhout, Belgium, 1982); Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exem
Jacques
plorum:A HandbookofMedieval ReligiousTales (Helsinki,1969).
5. For theHebrew text, see A. Neubauer and M. Stern, eds., Hebr?ische Berichte ?ber die
w?hrendderKreuzz?ge (Berlin,1892;hereafter,
Judenverfolgungen NS), pp. 58-75 [Hebrew];
187-213 (German trans.) and Abraham Habermann, ed., Sefer zekhirah, selihot vekinnot
(Jerusalem, 1970; hereafter, H); English translation in Shlomo Eidelberg, ed. and trans., The
Jews and the Crusaders (Madison, 1977; hereafter, E).

6. Hereafter, DM, cited by book and chapter. See Joseph Strange, ed., Dial?gus
miraculorum (2 vols., Cologne, 1851); trans. H. von E. Scott and C C. Swinton Bland as The
onMiracles (London, 1929). On Caesarius, see Fritz "Studien zu Caesarius
Dialogue Wagner,
von Heisterbach/' Analecta Cisterciensia 29 (1973): 79-95; on Jews as narrators of similar
stories, see Joseph Dan, "Rabbi Judah the Pious and Caesarius of Heisterbach: Common
Motifs in Their Stories/' Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971): 18-27; and idem, "The Story of the
Proceedingsof theAmericanAcademyfor Jewish
Jerusalemite," Research35 (1967):104-8.
7. For a further discussion of this distinction, see Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, chap. 1,
and Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, pp. 1-15.
8. For some of the methodological issues, see Robert Bonfil, "'Myth, Rhetoric and
An Inquiry into Megillat Ahimaâts," [Hebrew] in Menahem Ben-Sasson, et al.,
History?'
Tarbul vehevrah betoledot yisraêl bimei habenayim [Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson Memorial Volume]
(Jerusalem, 1989), pp. 99-135; idem, "Can Medieval Storytelling Help Understanding
Midrash? The Story of Paltiel: A Preliminary on and Midrash," inMichael
Study History
Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History (Albany, 1993),
pp. 228-54; Ivan G. Marcus, "History, Story and Collective Memory: in Early
Narrativity
Ashkenazic Culture," Prooftexts 10 (1990): 365-88.
9. On 1096, see Marcus, "From Politics toMartyrdom," 40-52; Chazan, European Jewry
and the First Crusade. The texts are available in NS, H, and E. For the Toledot Yeshu texts,
which shouldbe reedited and translated, see Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach
j?dischen
Quellen (1902; reprinted, Hildesheim, 1977), and Herbert W. Basser, "The Acts of Jesus," in
Barry Walfish, ed., The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume I (Haifa, 1993), pp. 273-82 and nn.
10. Carolyn Walker Bynum, "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?" in her
JesusasMother: Studies in theSpirituality
of the
HighMiddle Ages (Berkeley,1982),pp. 82-109;
Ivan G. Marcus, "Hierarchies, Boundaries and Jewish Spirituality in Medieval
Religious
Jewish 1:2 (Fall 1986), 7-26.
Germany," History
11. William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 10.
12. NS, 59; H, 116; E, 122. The letter is translated in Robert Chazan, ed., Church, State,
Middle Ages (New York, 1980),p. 107.
and Jewin the
13. NS, 64; H, 121; E, 130. For Jewish awareness of the five stigmata, compare the anti^
Christian argument in the thirteenth-century Hebrew polemical handbook, Nitsahon yashan,
that "He who was wounded five times is not [lo] the Lord." See Berger, The Jewish-Christian
Debate, par. 54.
14. See Matt. 27:11, 29, 37, 42, etc.
15. Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Rites
of Violence," in her Society and Culture in Early
Modern Europe (Stanford, 1975), pp. 152-87.
16. See Ch. Merchavia, Hatalm?d bireH hanatsrut [The Talmud in the mirror of Chris
tianity](Jerusalem,1970),pp. 132-33.
17. Augustine, De civitate Dei, 18.46, ed. and trans. George E. McCracken et al. (7 vols.;
London, 1957-72), 6:50-51. See Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 19-30,
and Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews ofMedieval Latin Europe (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992), pp. 17-20.
18. See BernhardBlumenkranz,Le juifm?di?valau miroirde l'artchr?tien(Paris,1966),
fig.65, p. 61 and fig.52, p. 51.
19. See midrash Bereshit Rabban, sec. 63, ed. Theodor-Albeck (3 vols.; Jerusalem, 1965),
2:693-94.
20. R. Jacob ben Meir, Sefer hayashar, ed. S. Rosenthal (Berlin, 1898).
21. See Ivan G. Marcus, "Une communaut? et le doute: mourir pour la
pieuse
du Nom (Qiddouch ha-Chem) enAshkenaz (Europedu Nord) et l'histoirede
Sanctification
rabbi Amnon de Mayence," Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 5 (September-October 1994),
1045.
22.
Sefer hasidim,
ed. Jehuda Wistinetzki, par. 811 (Frankfurt am Main, 1924), p. 204.
23. The Hebrew text is in R. Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, Sefer or zarua1, pt. 2 (Zhitomir,
1862), fol. 63a, on which see Marcus, "Une communaut? pieuse et le doute," passim. As Eli
Yassif has noted, theAmnon story is partially indebted to theTheophilus episode in an
eleventh-century Italian Hebrew rhymed narrative. See Benjamin Klar, ed., Megillat
Ahimaâts (Jerusalem, 1947), p. 25, trans. Marcus Saltzman as The Chronicle
ofAhimaaz (New
York, 1924), pp. 80-81, and Eli Yassif, "Studies in the Narrative Art of Megillat Ahimaats,"
[Hebrew] in Jerusalem Studies inHebrew Literature 5 (1984): 33, n. 42.

24. See Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, p. 64.
25. On Guibert, see The Memoirs ofGuibert ofNogent, bk. 2, chap. 5, ed. John F. Benton
as Self and Society inMedieval France (Toronto, 1970), p. 137; forHermannus, see n. 27.
26. R. Jacob b. Meir, Sefer hayashar, no. 25, p. 45.
27. Bernhard Blumenkranz, "J?dische und christliche Konvertiten im j?disch-christ
lichen Religionsgespr?ch des Mittelalters," in Paul Wilpert, ed., Miscellanea Mediaevalia,
Band 4, JudentumimMittelalter:Beitr?gezum christlich-j?dischen
Gespr?ch (Berlin,1966),
p. 275. For Hermannus's autobiographical narrative, see Gerlinde Niemeyer, ed., Hermannus
(Quondam Judaeus Opusculum de Conversione Sua (Weimar, 1963), trans. Karl F. Morrison as
Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine ofHippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos
(Charlottesville, Va., 1992), pp. 76-113; Jeremy Cohen, "The Mentality of theMedieval Jewish
Peter Alfonsi, Hermann of Cologne, and Pablo Christiani," in Todd M. Endelman,
Apostate:
ModernWorld (New York, 1987),pp. 29-35;Aviad M. Kleinberg,
Apostasy in the
ed., Jewish
"Hermannus Judaeus's Opusculum: In Defense of Its Authenticity," Revue des ?tudes juives
151:3-4 (July-December 1992): 337-53; Anna Sapir Abulafia, "The Ideology of Reform and
Changing Ideas Concerning Jews in the Works of Rupert of Deutz and Hermannus
History7:1 (Spring1993):50-63.
Quondam Judeus,"Jewish
28. Arnoldo "A Medieval Jewish Autobiography," inHugh
Momigliano, Lloyd-Jones
et al, eds., History and Imagination: Essays inHonour ofH R. Trevor-Roper (Duckworth, 1981),
pp. 35-36.
29. See Matt. 28:16-20; Mark 16:14-16; Luke 24:44-49; and John 20:19-23.
30. On Jewish males menstruating or otherwise and its connection to
hemorrhaging
the Passion account inMatt. 27:25 ("His blood ..."), see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and
226 IVANG. MARCUS
the Jews (New York, 1943), pp. 50-51 and 228, nn. 25-27, and consider the narrative in
Ephraim of Bonn's Sefer zekhirah discussed earlier.

31. The use of dog images by Christians about Jews and vice versa iswidespread and
deserves fuller treatment. See David Berger, "Christians, Gentiles, and the Talmud: A
Jewish Response to theAttack on Rabbinic Judaism," in Bernard Lewis

Fourteenth-Century
and Friedrich Niew?hner, eds., Religionsgespr?ch imMittelalter [Wolfenb?ttler Mittelalter
Studien, Band 4] (Wiesbaden, 1992),p. 129 and A. Wells, "Attitudes to the Jews in Early
Middle High German Religious Literature and Sermons," London Studies in German Litera
ture 4 (1992): 40-42. Fear of seeing "a dog or a Christian" led towrapping a male child who
was taken from his house to the Jewish teacher for the first time. See R. Eleazar ben Judah of
Worms (d. ca. 1230), Sefer haroqeah (Fano, 1505), par. 296.
32. See Solomon Grayzel, ed., The Church and the Jews in the XHIth rev. ed.
Century,
(New York, 1966),p. 309.
33. R. of Corbeil,
Isaac mitsvot qatan (New York, n.d.), par. 11.
Sefer
34. Tosafot to B. Avodah Zarah 2a, s.v. asur, on which see Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and
Tolerance (New York, 1961), pp. 24-36.
35. See Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, p. 115, and see p. 307 for a canon from the
Council of Paris in 1213, prohibiting Christian women to serve as wet nurses to Jewish
babies, which clearly was being ignored.
36. See William Chester Jordan, "Christian Excommunication of the Jews in theMiddle
History1 (1986):34.
Ages: A Restatementof the Issues," Jewish
37. Patricia Hidiroglou, "Les juifs d'apr?s la litt?rature latine de Auguste ?
Philippe
Philippe leBel," Revuedes ?tudesjuives 133 (1974):415, fromthecontinuationof theChronicon
of Guillaume de Nangis, monk of St. Denis (ob. ca. 1300), ed. H. G?raud, I, 355; RHR, XX,
p. 596, document LVI in her appendices.
38. There are different versions of the ceremony. In addition to Eleazar ben Judah of
see R. Simha of
Worms, Sefer haroqeah, par. 296, Vitry, Mahzor Vitry, ed. S. Horowitz (Berlin,
1889-97), p. 621. On the meanings of the rite, see Marcus, Rituals of Childhood.
39. For the Leipzig mahzor illumination, see Elias Katz, ed., Machsor Lipsiae (Jerusalem,
1964), plate 29; also reproduced in Andreas Nachama and Gereon Sievernich, eds., J?dische
Lebenswelten: Katalog (Berlin 1991), p. 449 (fig. 20:1/48); E. Cohen, "The Teacher, the Father,
and the Virgin Mary," pp. 71-76; llene Forsyth, The Throne ofWisdom (Princeton, 1972), and
Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, chap. 5.
Mundy, Europe in the

40. John HighMiddle Ages, 1150-1309(New York, 1973),p. 210.On
Polcelina, see Robert Chazan, "The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal
American
Organization," Proceedings of the Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968): 13-31. For the
Council ofCanterbury,see Cecil Roth,A Historyof theJewsinEngland (Oxford,1964),pp. 41
and 83.

Jews and Christians Imagining Other

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Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe

Author(s): IVAN G. MARCUS

Jews and Christians Imagining theOther

THE JEWSOF MEDIEVAL EUROPE as well as theChristianmajority

vehicles for portraying how Jews and Christians imagined encountering

being persuaded to become Christians. Moreover, the images Ephraim

motives "we have not inquired whether he was

On the second festival day of Shavuot [Pentecost], French crusaders gathered

Although the crusader motive of revenge for the crucifixion is com

Jewish ritual objects offers a Jewish-Christian parallel to what Natalie

The Christians also attack themaster of talmudic dialectic, the epit

in private encounters. Thus, in Sefer hasidim (Book of the Pietists), from

The nobleman's assumption, "perhaps he will be tempted" to con

No one shall presume to baptize their sons or daughters against theirwill

Christianity or at least were worrying that theymight appear to be. It also

I turn now to a complementary Christian case to illustrate the way

scarcely pay attention

miraculously bleeding wooden crucified Jesus.

Implied in the dramatic confrontation between the bishop and the

general and of the eucharistie sacrifice in particular. Thus, in a late

They do not believe [inGod] but stand likemutes [!] in the

expressed in the Hebrew texts that accompany the initiation ceremony,

significant changes. According to the crusaders in 1096, the Jews should

Departments of History and Religious Studies

and theVirginMary in theLeipzig

Mirsky (Philadelphia,1990),pp. 17-19and 121-42.

Jews and the Crusaders (Madison, 1977; hereafter, E).

[Hebrew] in Jerusalem Studies inHebrew Literature 5 (1984): 33, n. 42.

Ephraim of Bonn's Sefer zekhirah discussed earlier.

Jewish Response to theAttack on Rabbinic Judaism," in Bernard Lewis

Mundy, Europe in the

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