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Reason in the History of Persecution
Observations on the Historiography of Jewish-Christian Relations from the Perspective of Forced Baptisms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Abstract
Forced baptism, as a long-lasting instance of the persecution of Jews in Western societies, has been a highly controversial historiographical issue. Taking into account the risks involved in such a stance—as being a “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” and advocating “teleological,” “anachronistic,” “judiciary” views—this article deals with the historiographical trends which, ruling out the “persecuting society” paradigm and systematically minimizing the part played by religious factors to explain the forms of persecution, have resulted in specific works on historical causality and temporality. Two situations (the first Crusade in 1096 and the Crusade of the Pastoureaux in 1320) enable us to observe the mechanisms of rationalization in this new history of persecution, and show the diversity of its objects and approaches.
- Type
- Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages
- Information
- Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 5 - 39
- Copyright
- Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2012
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63. Ibid., 223.
64. The provocative wording is qualified in a note: Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 225 n. 88.
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96. Jean Duns Scot, Opus oxoniense, lib. 4, d. 4, q. 9, ed. Marmursztejn and Piron, “Duns Scot et la politique,” 58–62.
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98. Fourth Council of Toledo, canon 60, trans. Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, 488; Decretum Gratiani, C. 28, q. 1, c. 11 (Fr. I, 1087).
99. Parisoli, “La contribution de Duns Scot,” 610.
100. Marmursztejn and Piron, “Duns Scot et la politique,” 61–62.
101. The text of the note is published in Poujol, Les enfants cachés, 187.
102. She explains: “The son of a Jew is Jewish and part of his identity is targeted by the genocide that has affected his people and still affects them today. This may be one of the characteristic features of the process, the only one of its kind, known as the ‘Memory of the Shoah.’ Hence the endlessly revived sense of outrage, the permanently open wound, the immediate leap into the present. As evidence, I cite the press campaign in 2004 and 2005 that followed my discovery of a document proving that the Catholic Church did indeed issue an order not to return baptized Jewish children to their parents” (ibid., 297).
103. Ibid., 298.
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108. Ibid., 274.
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111. Ibid., 354–58.
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122. “We will hear an echo [in sources on the events of 1096] of what befell our generation. We will also draw from them strength to bear the pain and offer a bit of consolation in order to continue. Our enemies wanted to annihilate us, but we are still alive” (quoted in Myers, “Mehabevin Et Ha-Tsarot,” 60).
123. Ibid., 61.
124. The “dangers” of which were “particularly evident in the post-Holocaust world in which the impulse to ‘cherish affliction’ has become a central pillar of Jewish identity, even when that impulse has been shorn of its traditional rationale” (ibid.).
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130. Ibid., 31: the exaltation of martyrdom to “sanctify the name of God” is mentioned as one of the responses generated by persecution, without any direct link to the events of 1096.
131. Grossman, “The Cultural and Social Background of Jewish Martyrdom in 1096,” in Y. T. Assis et al., Facing The Cross, ix-x; Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 13–30.
132. Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 60.
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134. Salomon bar Samson maintains that in Ratisbon converts only received baptism under harsh constraint when they were unable to resist the enemy who “did not want to kill them,” (Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte, 480).
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146. Ibid., especially 136–38.
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158. Barber, Malcolm, “The Pastoureaux of 1320,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32, no. 2 (1981): 143–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on this 144–49.
159. The distinction between absolute and conditional compulsion is set out by Innocent III in a letter to the Archbishop of Arles in 1201, placed in the Liber extra in 1234 and known as the decretal Maiores. In it the Pope answers several questions on the necessity of intention in baptism (and first of all, on the usefulness of baptism for children unable to give their consent). While asserting that it is against the Christian faith to compel anyone who is unwilling to adopt and observe Christianity, the Pope required on the other hand that the distinction be made between “compelled and compelled”: unlike a person who rejected it outright, a person who did not consent but who let themselves to be baptized under threat—conditionaliter volens, licet absolute non velit—effectively received the sacramental character and had to keep the Christian faith (Liber extra, lib. 3, tit. 42, c. 3, Fr. II, 644-646). The genesis of norms about compulsion has been traced by Poutrin, “L’Église et les consentements arrachés,” 492–98.
160. Confessio Baruc, 185.
161. Ibid., 189.
162. Ibid., 179.
163. Ibid.
164. Ibid., 184. Grayzel, “The Confession of a Medieval Jewish Convert,” 101 n. 27, identified a reference in this passage to the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides: “But in time of persecution, that is, when a wicked king arises, like Nebukadnezzar and his like, and he decrees against Israel to destroy their faith or one of the commandments, he [the Jew] must permit himself to be killed and not transgress even one of the other commandments [that is, outside of the three for which a Jew must suffer martyrdom at all times: idolatry, immorality and the shedding of blood], whether he is compelled to such violations in the presence of ten fellow-Jews or is alone with the idolator.” In the Talmud, the principle whereby martyrdom should be preferred to the profanation of God’s name in the presence of ten other Jews is not specified by the distinction between the order of the prince and popular violence, and it is not specified in the Epistle on Persecution either, where Maimonides distinguishes in addition between being forced “to perform actions” and being forced “simply to utter words”: “to him who comes to ask us whether he should let himself be killed or accept [the prophetic mission of Mohamed], we answer: let him recognize [Mohamed] and not let himself be killed; but let him not stay in this king’s realm [...]; he must go into exile in a suitable place and absolutely not stay in a place of persecution and whoever does stay transgresses and profanes the Holy Name and is close to deliberate sin.” (Maimonides, Épîtres (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 38–41).
165. Barber, “The Pastoureaux of 1320,” 153–55.
166. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 43.
167. Ibid., 48.
168. Ibid., 43.
169. Ibid., 48. The political, religious and financial motives for royal protection are analyzed in Dahan, Gilbert, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 44–53 Google Scholar. The prince essentially envisaged the protection of his Jewish subjects as a duty of justice that would ensure peace; he sometimes justifies it by the Church’s demand that the Jewish people survive as a witness; in some cases, the Jews bought this protection. The prince also protected them, however, because he regarded them as his property. On the question of the Jews in servitude to the sovereign, see Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 65–76; Gavin I. Langmuir, “Judei nostri and the Beginning of Capetian Legislation,” Traditio 16 (1960): 203–40; Id., “Tanquam servi: The Change in Jewish Status in French Law about 1200,” [1980] Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): 167–94.
170. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 49.
171. Ibid.
172. Ibid., 51.
173. Extended to all “medieval persons” in Nirenberg, David, “Warum der König die Juden Beschützen musste, und warum er sie verfolgen musste,” in Die Macht des Königs. Herrschaft in Europa vom Frühmittelalter bis in die Neuzeit, ed. Jussen, B. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), 229 Google Scholar. In support of this generalization, Nirenberg quotes Pierre le Chantre: “Hii vero latrunculi sunt nunc sanguisuge principum qui, cum omnia suxerint, evomunt in fiscum” (taken from the Latin Patrology when quoted in Nirenberg. The text here comes from the recent and most accurate version by Monique Boutry, ed., Verbum adbreviatum, pars 1, cap. 48, (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004): 324), to which Abelard may be opposed in, for example, A Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew, and a Christian (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 32–33: “Dispersed among all the nations, alone, without an earthly king or prince, are we not burdened with such great demands that almost every day of our miserable lives we pay the debt of an intolerable ransom? [...] The princes themselves who rule over us and for whose patronage we pay dearly desire our death all the more to such a degree that they then snatch away the more freely what we possess.”
174. Menache, Sophia, “The King, the Church and the Jews: Some Considerations on the Expulsions from England and France,” Journal of Medieval History 13, no. 3 (1987): 223–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
175. Jordan, William C., “Home Again: The Jews in the Kingdom of France, 1315–322,” [1997] Ideology and Royal Power in Medieval France: Kingship, Crusades and the Jews (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), xiv, 27–45, on this 27.Google Scholar
176. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 50. For the crusades as a form of taxation, see Barber, “The Pastoureaux of 1320,” 160–61.
177. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 49.
178. de Laurière, Eusèbe, ed., Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race (Paris, 1723), 488–89 Google Scholar.
179. Céline Balasse, 1306. L’expulsion des juifs du royaume de France (Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2008), 178–79.
180. The readmission edict of July 28, 1315 recalled the Jews for twelve years: “Edict or etablissement recalling the Jews for 12 years, and provisions against usury,” Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 1308-1327 (Paris: Belin-Leprieur/Plon), 3: 116.
181. It must be remembered that the duty to protect the Jews was very generally based on the doctrine of their guilt and servitude and the need to ensure conditions for the fulfillment of the prophecy that they would convert nearing the end of times. In Oldrado da Ponte, for example, whose collection of consilia dates precisely from the 1320s, there is the notion that the prince must protect the Jews, enslaved by the death of Christ, because they are his serfs: Oldrado da Ponte, consilium 87, in Jews and Saracens in the Consilia of Oldradus de Ponte, ed. N. Zacour (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 83.
182. Nirenberg, David, “Le dilemme du souverain : génocide et justice à Valence, 1391,” in Un Moyen Âge pour aujourd’hui. Mélanges offerts à Claude Gauvard, eds. Claustre, J., Mattéoni, O. and Offenstadt, N. (Paris, PUF, 2010), 496–508 Google Scholar, on this 498.
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This is a translation of: La raison dans l’histoire de la persécution