The Critique of a Longue Durée Perspective

16The historiographical position defended here explicitly seeks to abandon the teleological routes that run right up to the extermination of the European Jews in the twentieth century. As David Nirenberg writes in the opening pages of Communities of Violence, minority studies, boosted by World War II, have been “transformed by some into a search for the roots of modern evils:” [53] “Regardless of their different periodizations, all these quests for the origins of European intolerance […] take the long view, seeking to establish a continuity between the hatreds of long ago and those of the here and now. This focus on the longue durée means that events are read less within their local contexts than according to a teleology leading, more or less explicitly, to the Holocaust.” [54] The objection will be made, without concern for rhetorical effect, that the project of replacing teleology with discontinuity is not less determined by the Shoah. By insisting on contextualizing acts of violence in order to counter a teleological “orthodoxy” based on the idea of a “fundamental continuity between collective systems of thought across historical time” [55] and a “steady march of European intolerance across the centuries,” [56] Nirenberg insisted on keeping the present at a distance: “The more we restore to those outbreaks of violence their own particularities, the less easy it is to assimilate them to our own concerns.” [57] Similarly, he expressed the desire to break from the “despair” which he said justified “such an embrace of linear narratives of escalating hatred.” [58] Taking context and change into account should make it possible to leave the closed field of affects by suppressing the despair that tends to reduce historical explanation to religious hatred. The historical rationality reasserts itself.

17In practice, the recourse to anthropology, which often contradicted the anti-structuralist viewpoint claimed by Nirenberg, sparked certain reservations. As Philippe Buc wrote in a critical note, [59] “has [Nirenberg] not destroyed the historiographical blend of a persecuting mentality by recreating or tacitly accepting other kinds of totalizing synthesis provided by anthropology?” [60] For example, Nirenberg interpreted the ritual “stoning of Jews” in Aragon during the Holy Week as an “implicit criticism of the king.” [61] The clerics who perpetrated these attacks were perfectly aware that they were targeting the monarch, in a “clerical antiroyalist carnival” [62] that Nirenberg saw as “not only a game, but a children’s game.” [63] He used the work of Bruno Bettelheim to support his theory [64] that the violence of the young clerics demonstrated the “children’s tendency toward polarization and projection [which] represents a necessary stage in the process of psychic maturation,” the “process of dividing the world into good and evil, then destroying the evil and rewarding the good” enabling children to “gain the psychic stability to avoid being ‘engulfed by [the] unmanageable chaos’ and ambiguities of adult life.” [65] In seeking to escape from the “structuralist consensus in the historiography of persecution,” Nirenberg introduced, in this instance, an anthropological structuralism that seems scarcely less questionable.

18In fact, the study of forced baptisms in the longue durée would only be guilty of continuism and teleology if it were to confuse “origins” with causes designed to produce effects that would be deemed inevitable a posteriori. Now, it was precisely in order to guard against the lures of the “idol of origins”—against the frequent confusion of “beginnings” and “causes,” filiation and explanation [66]—that Marc Bloch promoted the study of historical evolutions in the longue durée. Against the tendency of the “tribe of historians” to systematically explain what is closest in terms of what is most remote, Bloch called for explaining phenomena in terms of evolution and the long term: “In biology, to give an account of an organism’s existence is not simply to search for its parental forms; it is equally important to determine the character of the environment which allows it to live, yet forces it to undergo certain modifications. The same is true—mutatis mutandis—for occurrences in society.” [67] Baron himself, as we have seen, thought that only taking a long-term view could help give a more accurate view of the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations that would contrast with a purely fact-based perspective of the crises and outbursts of violence of which the Jews were victims. [68] Then, it does not seem that discerning the permanence of certain representations and certain doctrines in very different contexts amounts to tipping into sterile continuism at the level of historical explanation. That the yellow badge and the yellow star separated by seven centuries were part of the same desire to designate and single out the Jews does not make the yellow badge of the Middle Ages the forerunning sign of contemporary extermination. Baron was fiercely critical of what he saw as unfounded parallels between the situation imposed on the Jews in Nazi Germany and the status they enjoyed in medieval Europe. Even so, he did not deny that the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in many ways echoed (a distinctive sign, exclusion from certain kinds of activity, strict segregation) the discrimination imposed in Christian lands in the Middle Ages. [69]

19The longue durée perspective makes it possible to understand forced baptism and the doctrines that supported its practice in their permanence as well as in their contingent manifestations. So, as we have seen, the fundamental paradox of unlawful but valid forced baptisms is expressed in a canon of the Fourth Council of Toledo (633), inserted into Gratian’s Decretum before the middle of the twelfth century:

20

On the Jews, however, thus did the holy synod order, that no-one should henceforth be forced to believe […]; such men should not be saved unwillingly but willingly, in order that the procedure of justice should be complete; for just as the man perished obedient to the serpent out of his own free will, so will any man be saved—when called by the divine grace—by believing and in converting his own mind. They should be persuaded to convert, therefore, of their own free choice (libera arbitrii facultate), rather than forced by violence.
Those, however, who were formerly forced to come to Christianity (as was done in the days of the most religious prince Sisebut), since it is clear that they have been associated in the divine sacraments, received the grace of baptism, were anointed with chrism, and partook of the body of the Lord, it is proper that they should be forced to keep the faith even though they had undertaken it under duress, lest the name of the Lord be blasphemed and the faith they had undertaken be treated as vile and contemptible. [70]

21The paradox of unlawful yet valid baptism is expressed again in the middle of the eighteenth century by Pope Benedict XIV in the letter Postremo mense, sent on February 28, 1747 to the vice-regent of Rome. The first part of the letter precisely treated infant baptism and stated clearly, according to Marina Caffiero, that there had been a rise in the number of Jewish children being baptized without their parents’ knowledge. [71] The Pope declared these baptisms lawful in a number of cases, [72] including when they had been carried out in secret by servants. [73] Any subsequent reversion to Judaism was considered as apostasy. Hence, the Christian upbringing of these children had to be ensured: [74] “If they have already received the sacrament, they must either be kept or taken from their Jewish parents and entrusted to the care of faithful Christians to be raised piously and religiously, since these baptisms, though unlawful, are true and valid.” [75] In addition to the decisions of the Holy See establishing the validity of such baptisms in 1633, 1638, 1698 and 1708, [76] the Pope also invoked, specifically in support of this passage, Canon 60 of the Fourth Council of Toledo which stipulated that “the sons and daughters of the Jews should be separated from the company of their parents in order that they should not become further entangled in their deviation, and entrusted either to monasteries or to Christian, God-fearing men and women, in order that they should learn from their way of life to venerate the faith and, educated on better things, progress in their morals as well as their faith.” [77]

22The same paradox can be found in the Finaly case. When they were consulted by Bishop Caillot, the theologians of the Grenoble Seminary replied in a note dated January 18, 1953 that Antoinette Brun did not have the “lawful, perfect and permanent guardianship” equivalent to parental rights that would have given her the right to have the children baptized. She could not then “assert any personal right to give [them] a religious upbringing.” The baptism of the Finaly children was nevertheless defined as “sacramentally valid,” although “seriously unlawful.” [78] This in no way implies that the Council of 633 was at the root of the Finaly case in the sense that it accounted for all the causes. Moreover, in 1956, it was not a causal chain that Jules Isaac established but “a chain of sorrow almost unbroken since those distant days of the seventh century right up to our own day and the Finaly case.” [79] The Bulletin rationaliste, the mouthpiece of the Fédération de librepensée de Haute-Savoie, [80] on the other hand, posited that “Catholic tradition, as established by the councils, prelates and popes, leads quite naturally to the Finaly case.” [81] Grouping together the rulings of the Council of Toledo, the Inquisition, the crusades, Benedict XIV’s letter Postremo mense, and the Mortara case (1858), confirms these premises: “the constant attitude of Catholicism towards the baptized is a direct consequence of the meaning given to baptism” since Paul’s Letter to the Romans that depicts the sacrament “as a ‘regeneration,’ ‘a new birth’ which prevails over the first one as the spirit prevails over the flesh and henceforth means life ‘in Christ’ as a ‘member’ of his mystical ‘body.’” [82]

23If this series of events and documents makes sense in the midst of the Finaly case, the echo effect does not abolish the need to take into account the uniqueness of situations in which the arguments that were already available were pressed into service and restructured, as against the assumption that there was a continuous and cumulative increase in persecution. As used in 1747 by Benedict XIV, the paradox of unlawful and valid baptism endorsed and encouraged clandestine baptisms; the same paradox, which was contained in the 1953 note from the Grenoble theologians, did not determine their stance or that of Bishop Caillot who then advised Archbishop Gerlier to return the Finaly children to their family. In addition, noting these “Visigothic” revivals does not necessarily mean failing to note the radically different positions that were expressed in between.

The Critique of Anachronism

24The other criticism the study of forced baptism might face from the perspective of temporality is anachronism. But here again, there seems to be little ground for such a critique, for no judicial end is pursued. It has nothing to do with bringing a case against the “sins” of past societies or condemning their “intolerance,” but with considering what persecution reveals about the way these societies operated and about their representations of themselves and others that enabled them to operate that way. Significantly, the term intolerance is more often used by the writers who endeavor to justify the “rationality” of the positions that favor forced baptism, by invoking in particular the pressure of conformism and the lack of doctrinal alternative. We will provide just a few examples here.

25The article Pierre Cazier devoted in 1979 to the attitude of Isidore of Seville on “the anti-Jewish policy of the Visigothic sovereigns,” [83] reveals an apologetic aim. In his desire to impart “some nuances” onto Bernhard Blumenkranz’s “harsh judgment” of Visigothic Spain, [84] not only did Cazier expose the anachronism of such a judgment, but he also stood up for the bishop as “more concerned to persuade and guide than to compel by force.” [85] By approving the consequences of Sisebut’s campaign of forced conversions at the Fourth Council of Toledo, Isidore attempted “to settle the Jewish problem by achieving a compromise between contradictory demands” and opted for the use of his authority to strengthen the power that guaranteed public peace. [86] He was, moreover, conforming to the “Augustinian tradition,” supported in this instance by unconvincing quotations from the antidonatist treatise on baptism, [87] as there was no doctrinal alternative available: “Could the theology of the day accept the idea that a baptism was invalid because there was no genuine consent? It would appear that the question did not arise for men who accepted infant baptism and regarded the baptism of heretics as valid.” [88] As for conversion, if Isidore preferred persuasion out of a concern for effectiveness, he also accepted that God used fear to bring men to conversion: “So that those who refuse to convert voluntarily are corrected by terror, He strikes certain men sometimes with threats, sometimes with blows, sometimes with revelations.” [89] Yet he recalled that new converts should be treated patiently lest “in terror they return to their former errors.” This nuance “conveys well,” according to Cazier, “the pastoral style of Isidore, the enemy of all violence.” [90] The internal weakness of an argument that tends to merge into a defence of Isidore of Seville definitively compromises the historical explanation of the 633 legislation.

26It was on somewhat different terms that Luca Parisoli endeavored to “demonstrate the rationality” of Duns Scotus’ position in favor of forced baptisms, “in order to defend it against any accusation of anachronism.” [91] For Parisoli, the forced baptism of Jewish children was precisely “one of the most common instances in which Duns Scotus’ adversaries could criticize him for his vision of the ghastly aspect of authority […] and for a cruelty that does not sit well with a champion of the love of God and man. Painting Duns Scotus as intolerant is something peculiar to our century, since someone like Joseph de Maistre would have seen nothing wrong with forced baptism. To defend Duns Scotus, however, it is not necessary to assume the defense of a reactionary Catholicism, and it is not enough to justify his thesis in terms of historical contingencies, so much so that it must be remembered that the opposing stance of Thomas and Guido Terreni, who upheld the injustice of forced baptism, can perfectly well be linked—and the life of the Inquisitor Terreni is an apt example [92]—to a ferocious attitude against those who stray from the Catholic faith.” [93] As had been stressed by Goffredo Quadri, the struggle for the faith was waged at that time “by means which were, admittedly, not progressive, though they belonged to the practice of the day. Our doctor could not think otherwise than his contemporaries about these contingent policy issues.” [94] Without further concern for divergent positions, [95] Parisoli suggested re-reading Duns Scotus’ text on forced baptisms [96] as the “argument of a radical proponent of the spiritual involvement of political authorities” “in keeping with a certain interpretation of the law at the time.” [97] The accumulation of references to canon law—most importantly Canon 60 of the Fourth Council of Toledo, [98] stipulating the removal of children as a condition for and guarantee of their Christian upbringing—constructed a background designed to demonstrate the “evidence” of Duns Scotus’ discourse which did not aim at the “co-existence between different religious beliefs” or raise the question of “a secular society within which different faiths may cohabit.” [99]

27Parisoli’s approach seems to obey a triple logic here: it shifts Duns Scotus’ actual writing into the background; it creates a fictitious (“anachronistic”) position (designed to act as a reference point for a justificatory line of argument); and it develops a partial context on the basis of the canonical authorities regarded as decisive. And yet, regardless of any “judicial” aim, what the analysis of Duns Scotus’ whole text reveals, is the very uniqueness of his position on forced baptisms within the doctrinal context of his times: the theologian not only declared himself in favor of the forced baptism of children and their separation from their parents, but also in favor of the forced baptism of adults “through threat and terror” and even in favor of confining the “remnant of Israel,” called to convert as the end of time draws near, “on an island.” Second, Parisoli restricts his suggested contextualization to canon law. Duns Scotus’ actual text, however, includes a single reference to the Council of Toledo, intended to support the need to compel unbelieving parents to convert per minas et terrores. [100] Besides, how is it possible to explain that the canonical authorities cited by Parisoli, which predate the fourteenth century, did not determine the positions of theologians who, prior to Duns Scotus, had pondered the issue of forced baptisms or even those of the decretists at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century? In the same way, how might one account for Guido Terreni’s strong criticism of Duns Scotus’ positions? Eventually, the initial suggestion to re-read the text as the “argument of a radical proponent of the spiritual involvement of the political authorities” appears more convincing than the evidence mustered.

28The argument of the coercion of dogma was again invoked by Catherine Poujol in her work on the Finaly case, regarding the note dated October 23, 1946, which Papal Nuncio Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, sent to Cardinal Gerlier “on the subject of Jewish children who, during the German occupation, were entrusted to Catholic institutions and families and whom Jewish institutions want handed over to them.” Article 3 stipulated that “the children who have been baptized may not be placed in institutions that could not ensure their Christian upbringing.” Article 5 reads: “if the children were placed by their parents and if the parents now want them back, as long as the children have not been baptized, they may be returned.” [101] Referring to the strong reactions provoked by the publication of this note without her authorization in Corriere della Sera in 2004, Poujol implicitly condemned them as anachronistic [102] and concluded that there was no “alternative theology”: “What can be said about how public opinion was outraged in 2004-2005 by a decision taken by the Vatican just after the war and that pilloried the entire Catholic Church? The right question to ask was: was there an alternative theology in 1946? The answer, as I have shown in this work, is ‘no.’ The note from the Nunciature only says what dogma says. The hierarchy could only go in that direction even if it is hard to accept.” [103] This, it seems, is to make too little of the split in the clergy caused by the Finaly case—and stressed by Poujol herself—and, more generally, of the diversity of doctrinal positions and practical rules which, since the Middle Ages, have given the lie to the model of dogmatic unity and normative constraint developed by the sworn opponents of anachronism.

29Reflecting on doctrinal differences, on the clashes between norms and practice and on the diversity of the practical solutions themselves makes it possible to reject unequivocal explanatory patterns, whether “lachrymose” or irenic, as well as the idea that practice mechanically reflected a single, original rule, maintained as such by the institution. Canon law, theological debate and the customs of the Church—the central Thomist argument against forced baptism—form a set of sometimes contradictory features which interact and may be manipulated not just by theologians but by the protagonists themselves.

30We would now like to go into the detail of cases that make it possible to understand how historical causality has been fashioned in recent historiographical perspectives. We shall see that the choice of temporality and the systems of interpretation brought into play by some of the historians who claim them as their own correspond to the explicit project of getting rid of affects and introducing rational explanatory patterns into the history of persecution. Forced baptisms, which are, however, a main feature of the acts of violence committed on the fringes of the First Crusade and during the Shepherds’ Crusade, often remain a blind spot in their analyses.

Martyrdom, Infanticide and Ritual Murder

31The persecution of the Rhineland’s Jewish communities in spring 1096 followed, as is well known, Pope Urban II’s call to deliver the Holy Land from the enemies of Christ at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. Several groups of crusaders from England and from northern France passed through the Rhine Valley where, reinforced by locals, they targeted Jews and embarked on destruction, pillage, massacre and conversion. Under the leadership of Emicho de Flonheim, in particular, these groups attacked Speyer where eleven Jews who had refused to convert were killed; then Worms, in mid-May, where several hundred Jews met the same fate despite the bishop’s protection; then Mainz, where a massive attack that also ignored ecclesiastical authority resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews; then Cologne, where the archbishop managed to prevent a repeat of previous episodes but where the synagogue was set on fire and several Jews who had refused to be baptized were killed. The persecutions in the Rhineland were followed by Folkmar’s attacks on the Jews of Prague at the end of June and then by Gottschalk’s massacre of the Jews of Ratisbon who had refused to convert. At the end of July, all these groups had left the Rhine Valley and were on their way to the East.

32Recounted in three Hebrew chronicles in the first half of the twelfth century, these events had several unique characteristics. They were the first large-scale persecution of Jewish communities in north-western areas and the first occurrence of anti-Jewish persecutions linked to the crusades. [104] Moreover, unlike earlier episodes, in which Jews had been ordered to convert on pain of expulsion (as was the case in Mainz in 1012 and in Trier in 1066), in 1096 the Jews were given the choice between conversion and death. Finally, according to the chronicles’ detailed accounts, having exhausted their recourse to the protection of the local authorities and even to armed resistance, the Jews chose to die as martyrs by killing their children and then committing suicide. The role of women was underlined and a parallel drawn with their role in Christian martyrology. [105] The first act in sanctification of the name of God (kiddush-hashem) [106] was performed in Speyer by a religious woman who killed herself to avoid baptism. [107] There were collective suicides in Worms, in which fathers killed their sons and mothers their only children. [108] The case of Rachel of Mainz merits particular attention. [109] As the Christians drew near, the young woman begged her companions not to spare any of her four children “lest the uncircumcised come and take them alive in order to bring them up in the error of their faith.” [110] She sacrificed three of her children herself before being killed by the enemy who had finally managed to enter the house. [111]

33The kiddush-hashem therefore appears as an entirely new option. [112] If, however, the Talmud prescribed preferring martyrdom to idolatry, it did not imply that committing suicide or any kind of murder was allowed. The massacre of children, in particular, could not be supported by any legal or ritual instruction and the precedents invoked, largely typological (such as the binding of Isaac), scarcely bridged the gap between tradition and experience. [113] Ivan Marcus analyzed the strategies to justify martyrdom that were employed by the chroniclers. He stressed the “shift in paradigm” caused in the very course of the 1096 events by the failure of traditional religious and political solutions, which was construed as divine judgment and a trial of the just; the paradigm of Esther (political intercession at the Gentile court) gave way to the paradigm of the Temple (the martyrs being assimilated to the “Holy Things” that must be kept from contact with impure Christians); [114] only the members of the Holy Community could sacrifice Holy Things: in this way suicide reactualized the cult of the Temple. [115]

34The impact the 1096 events stemmed therefore from three new features: the scale of the persecution, the reaction of the Jews and the production of chronicles intended to justify martyrdom. Recent historiography has nevertheless endeavored to recategorize the historical event itself, long regarded as a decisive turning point in the evolution of the condition of the Jews in the west and, in particular, to account for the radical novelty of the suicides and infanticides that were presented by the chronicles as the sole means of escaping baptism.

35There are essentially two approaches to re-evaluating the rupture of 1096. The first one consists in connecting the importance of the event to its use in memory. The second one results in its being placed in a broader perspective in order to measure the impact it has had. In an article about the weight of the 1096 massacres in contemporary Jewish memory, [116] which followed fairly closely the reflections of David Myers, [117] Nirenberg notes that these massacres formed “a focal point in a narrative of Jewish history that asserts the identity of past and present suffering, and that finds its coherence in a teleology of escalating persecution leading to the Holocaust and to Zionist redemption.” [118] His point of view as a historian, strengthened by his personal experience, [119] led him to see it as one of the medieval components of contemporary Jewish identity. Wishing to establish the historical reality of this memory of violence, Nirenberg recalled its periods of absence [120] and interpreted its revival after the Shoah in terms of “historical therapy” for a “modern trauma.” [121] Myers had already highlighted the therapeutic function of the “lachrymose” historiography of the First Crusade: it was a case, as evidenced even in 1945 by the Sefer gezerot Ashkenaz ve-Tsarfat of Abraham Meir Habermann, of constructing a mythic community of historical fate between the Middle Ages and the modern age. [122] The “rupture” of 1096 then resulted mainly in a construct of memory that was built at the expense of “historical integrity;” [123] repeated references to the “trauma” of the First Crusade bore witness to a refusal, even an inability, to forget. [124]

36On a strictly historical level, consideration of the general evolution of the condition of the Jews in Europe leads to playing down the impact of the 1096 events that neither brought about the radical deterioration of that condition, which began in the eleventh century, continued in the twelfth and was heightened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, nor compromised their demographic, economic and intellectual development. [125] It is from the same continuist perspective, albeit within a much narrower framework, that Jonathan Elukin chooses to deal with the events of 1096. The pages he devotes to them in a chapter on the “social integration” of the Jews rely on extracts from the Hebrew chronicles that refer to the attempts by the local ecclesiastical authorities to protect the Jews and those of their Christian neighbors to hide them. In turning these texts into indirect sources on the Jews’ rootedness in local societies and on the quality of their relationship with their Christian environment, [126] Elukin affects to ignore Christian recommendations insisting that baptism be accepted, [127] which, in a context where groups of crusaders and their henchmen were themselves engaged in forced baptism as an alternative to massacre, deserved some attention. He concludes that the narratives constructed by the Jewish communities “emphasized or embellished the nature of martyrdom”: the “true martyrs” could only have been a minority and the Jews “quickly set about the process of rebuilding their lives.” [128] This reading of the sources, linked to the global project to account for the continuity of Jewish life in a Christian setting, goes therefore far beyond the rupture in historiography comprised, in Baron’s A Social and Religious History of the Jews, of the lack of any specific development of the events of 1096, the prime consideration of the protection the authorities’ gave to the Jews in the face of popular violence [129] and the refusal of episodes of suicide and infanticide. [130]

37These episodes have recently caused an upsurge of interest on the part of historians, who have diversified their approaches and extensively renewed the interpretation of the Hebrew chronicles. A constant feature of these analyses is that they take into account the religious and cultural proximity and rivalry between Jews and Christians. The radical novelty of suicides and infanticides has been resituated in a cultural context marked by both the specific features of Ashkenazi Judaism and the ideological climate of the First Crusade (common messianic expectations and the shared hope of imminent ultimate redemption). [131] The Hebrew chronicles, with their emphasis on the apocalyptic implications of events and with their calls for vengeance, regarded the crusades from the same perspective as Christians did: the killers were doomed to damnation and those who died to sanctify the name of God were destined for eternal life in the hereafter. [132]

38As a counterpoint to the consideration of the facts and the construction of their context, Jeremy Cohen hypothesized that the Hebrew chronicles provided less information about the martyrs themselves than about the ideology of martyrdom developed by the communities that survived the persecutions of 1096. [133] The scale of forced baptism under duress should not be underestimated. The Jewish and Christian chronicles were evidence of that: according to Salomon bar Samson, most of the Jews in Metz and all the Jews in Ratisbon were baptized by force before returning to Judaism. [134] Kenneth Stow, moreover, stressed the importance of the return-to-Judaism issue for the chroniclers who praised the religious constancy of the Jews who were converted by force, and promised them redemption. [135] It seems then that “the Hebrew chronicles are concerned as much with conversion to Christianity and return to Judaism as they are with Kiddush HaShem.” [136] Accepting the hypothesis that conversions were more numerous than admitted by the Hebrew chronicles, Stow suggests that martyrdom was a far more limited phenomenon than implied by the hundreds of names contained in the martyrological sources. [137] Positing that the shock of these conversions haunted the Ashkenazi conscience throughout the following decades, Cohen proposes reading the twelfth-century accounts as belated responses to events, inspired by a feeling of guilt and by contact with Christians, and conveying above all the meaning the survivors—many of whom returned to Judaism with the approval of Emperor Henry IV in 1097—wanted to give to these events. It is possible to think that their prime function was to maintain the memory of the martyrs who preferred death to baptism so as to strengthen resistance to Christianity and keep future generations from the temptation of conversion. [138]

39Finally, the suicides and infanticides of 1096 were seen from the point of view of the impact they had on Christians. Historian Israel Yuval recently linked the representation of the Jewish infanticides, as expressed in accusations of ritual murder in the twelfth century, to the impact of the massacres carried out on the fringes of the First Crusade. [139] Stow also made this link, at the end of a series of observations on the reactions of fear and anger of bishops who initially showed they were prepared to protect the Jews: why—and this is the question Salomon bar Samson has them ask—did the Jews kill their own children rather than be saved through baptismal grace? Moreover, by killing children who had been baptized by force, they created Christian martyrs. [140] Stow concludes, without further comment: “The vision of child murder was also about to serve as one basis for the accusations of ritual murder that first appeared and then proliferated in the later twelfth century.” [141]

40Yuval went much further in exploring the possibility, initially pointed out by Marcus, of a link “between Jews ritually killing Jews as martyrs and the Christian accusation, first attested in Norwich in 1144, that Jews ritually kill Christians.” [142] Placing himself within the perspective opened up by Cecil Roth, who suggested that the accusation of ritual murder was linked to a Jewish custom, [143] Yuval put forward an “additional explanation” for the emergence of the accusation, aiming at pointing out the circumstances that caused its invention and, above all, explained its success. [144] His demonstration was based on three premises: the almost simultaneous emergence of ritual murder in Norwich (in 1144) and in Wurzburg (in 1147, within the context of the pogroms linked to the Second Crusade) since it had spread across continental Europe even before the writing of the Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich by the Benedictine Thomas of Monmouth; [145] the link between martyrdom and messianic vengeance, with martyrdom conceived, in various chronicles and piyyutim, as an opportunity to hasten redemption by rousing the wrath of God against the enemies of his servants; [146] and “the negative impression” infanticides had on Christians, which Yuval bases on four excerpts from Hebrew sources and on brief quotations from the chronicles of Albert of Aix, [147] Bernold of Constance [148] and the Gesta Treverorum. [149]

41If, however, the Christian sources make the infanticides a radical expression of the refusal of baptism, none links accusations of ritual murder to the infanticides carried out by the Jews in 1096. The idea that the Jews’ hatred of Christianity posed an even greater threat to Christian children because it had induced the Jews to kill their own children in order to keep them from baptism stems in this case from a development that was exclusively foreign to the sources. By assigning real-life origins to the libel of ritual murder, Yuval does not say the Jews had in fact committed the murders of Christian children imputed to them or even some of them, but that the belief in these murders was based on the infanticides of 1096, seen as the expression of an unprecedented and violent hatred of Christians. In this way, he strangely isolates these infanticides and suicides from the massacres and attempted forced conversions that gave rise to them, and he makes them the basis of a fresh accusation rather than the uncommon and worsened outcome of anti-Jewish turmoil in the context of a crusade.

42The mention of Jewish criticism of the infanticides is the result of the same sort of approach. A rabbinical gloss on the ban on homicide (Genesis 9:5) is one oft-cited source about the communities’ own opposition to the murder of children:

43

There once was a rabbi [or teacher] who slaughtered many children in a time of persecution for he feared that they would be baptized. And there was another rabbi [or teacher] with him and he was furious at him and called him “murderer,” but the latter ignored [his remarks]. And that rabbi [or teacher] said: “if I’m right, he [the slaughterer] will die a horrid death.” And so it happened. The Gentiles seized him and first flayed his flesh and then put sand between the skin and the flesh. And the persecution came to an end and if he had not killed the children, they would have been saved. [150]

44The change in circumstance highlights the absurdity of the infanticides when looked at independently of actual persecution. Yuval moves from the Jewish exemplum, culminating in the torture of the murderous rabbi, to studying the “Christian responses” to the events of 1096. The sources gathered describe a vast Christian operation of forced rescue: in Mainz, they held back Jews who were throwing themselves into blazing synagogues; in Moers, they locked them up and kept them in confinement and under watch; and in Trier, the authorities had the wells locked out of fear that they would throw their children into them. [151]

45Yuval’s approach is no doubt an extreme case of how historians have worked with historical causality—in this instance despite the actual sources—in a way that contributes to constructing relationships in which the Jews are not reduced to the level of passive victims or neutral objects of persecution: their own acts contribute here to explaining the representations that sustained Christian violence. All things considered, the same kind of mechanism appears to be at play in Nirenberg’s interpretation of the anti-Jewish violence brought about by the Shepherds’ Crusade in 1320, which we will approach here through the case of the forced conversion of the Jew Baruch.

The Conversion of the Jew Baruch (1320)

46The case is documented in the “confession of Baruch, once a Jew, then baptized and now returned to Judaism,” [152] in the inquisition register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers between 1318 and 1325. [153] Nothing is known about Baruch the German. [154] Various details of the confessio imply that he held a minor teaching position in a Rhineland community and that he was perhaps one of the educated Jews who in 1315 returned to France with those Jews who had been expelled in 1306. [155] On the strength of the papal bull Turbato corde, promulgated by Clement IV in 1267, [156] it is as a lapsed convert—who returned to the “Judaic sect and rite” in Pamiers where he lived among Jews—that Baruch came within the Inquisition’s jurisdiction. The court before which he appeared for the first time on July 13, 1320 was a mixed court. In 1312, the Council of Vienne had in fact given bishops powers equal to those of the inquisitors when it came to heresy: approached by Jacques Fournier, the inquisitor of Carcassonne assigned him the Dominican, Gaillard de Pomies, in December 1318. [157] It was within this framework that, in 1320, Jacques Fournier decided to arrest, incarcerate and interrogate Baruch.

47The transcript of his interrogation offers a detailed account of the circumstances of his baptism, administered in Toulouse in June 1320, during the persecution by the Pastoureaux. This group of shepherds and country people was formed in the spring of 1320 to fight the enemies of the faith and reconquer the Holy Land. Their travels took them from Normandy to Paris, then on to Aquitaine where they began killing Jews. First defeated by the seneschal of Carcassonne, they were ultimately vainquished by the troops of Alfonso of Aragon. [158] The account of the events is followed by a debate with the bishop on the nature of the compulsion at the moment of baptism, underpinned by the canonical ruling on the validity of baptism under conditional compulsion. [159] A disputatio on the articles of the Christian faith, designed to secure the conversion baptism failed to deliver, ends the text of the confessio. While Baruch’s baptism was the outcome of an explosion of “cataclysmic violence,” his conversion by the Bishop of Pamiers was part of a lengthy process (between July and September 1320), which aimed to have him continue in the Christian faith by giving real content to the sacrament received. The disputatio was then the opportunity for a kind of a posteriori catechism. In addition, it was akin to a forced debate over which hung the explicit threat of death: the baptism he had received “not by force, nor under absolute compulsion, bound him in law and reason to observe and believe in the Christian faith, because the necessity that had pushed him toward the faith had drawn him not toward worse but toward better”; “he could rest assured that if he were to persist in Judaism, he would be tried according to the law as a stubborn heretic.” [160] Relative compulsion then appears both as an argument to prove the validity of Baruch’s baptism and as an effective means used by Jacques Fournier to have the lapsed heretic repent. After the disputatio, Baruch appeared in court one last time on September 25, 1320. He then confessed the truth of Christianity and said “he believed that it was for the good of his soul that the persecution that had brought him to baptism had befallen him and that he was not brought to believe in the Catholic faith by fear of death or torture, nor by the pressure of the prison cell, by threats, terrors, flattery or promises, but by the holy scriptures put before him by the lord bishop.” [161]

48As a counterpoint to the consideration of various aspects of persecution, recent historiography has focused on the question of the royal protection afforded to the Jews exposed to popular violence. Baruch addressed this very point during the disputatio. Did he think, according to the Law, the Talmud or his own opinion, that a Jew should let himself be killed rather than convert to a religion in which he did not believe he could be saved? A distinction had to be made, Baruch replied, between compulsion imposed by the prince and compulsion imposed by a popular riot. In his case, the Pastoureaux who had entered the Jewish Quarter had burst into his home shouting, “‘Death! Death! Either be baptized or we put you to death on the spot!’ As for him, seeing the fury of the people and that they were killing the Jews who said they would not be baptized, he answered that he would rather be baptized than killed. And so […] they took him to the Church of Saint-Étienne of the See of Toulouse and when he was there two clerics showed him dead Jews outside but still very close to the church, saying: ‘Unless you are baptized, you will be killed like those you see here have been killed’ and he was also struck by some of those who were there.” [162] It is under these circumstances that Baruch agreed to baptism even though he rejected it inwardly. [163] From his point of view, this was a temporary baptism, which, since it was imposed sine mandato principis, meant not choosing death. If, on the other hand, it had been imposed cum mandato principis, he should have preferred death “for the order of a prince can last a long time.” [164] In the face of the violence of the Pastoureaux, the prince appeared on this occasion to be the protector of “his” Jews even if he was unable to systematically rely on cooperation from the local town authorities (in Lézat and Albi, the consuls gave the Pastoureaux a very warm welcome). [165]

49Nirenberg’s hypothesis is as follows: the violence against the Jews, “however motivated by irrational hatred […], only gained meaning and usefulness for contemporaries in the context of much broader social conflicts, ideologies, and discourses.” [166] In this instance, the anti-Jewish violence caused by the Pastoureaux’s Crusade was a “revolt against the monarchy.” This, Nirenberg reiterates, “is not to imply that hatred of Jews did not play a role in the violence against them. It did. But the actions of the peasants and townspeople reflected more than hatred. Analysis of these actions in a wider context may help us understand both how political structures affected the meanings with which acts of religious violence could be invested, and how the violence of one subordinated group against another can constitute resistance to the powerful.” [167] In summary, Nirenberg insists on the historian’s duty to go beyond an interpretation that consists in deducing hate from observing a massacre: the word “irrational” is regarded as “dangerous” because it “suppress[es] analysis. If violence against minorities is without reason, then there is no need to study the contexts within which the violence occurred or look for conflicts that might have caused it: the interpretative landscape becomes monotonously flat.” [168] Removed along with hatred, the religious factor thus gives way to the political factor: the Pastoureaux and their partisans attacked the Jews whom they saw as the fiscal agents of the state. Some Jews did indeed perform these functions; moreover, the taxes levied specifically on Jews were viewed as a kind of indirect tax on Christians; lastly the Jews were protected by the king. [169] According to Nirenberg, the relationship between the Jews and the king was to be seen clearly, “albeit paradoxically,” in the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom in 1306, since the king immediately claimed the debts owed to them as his own and began collection efforts: “These efforts represented one of the largest mobilizations of royal officialdom to date […], and one leaving no doubt that in a very real sense Jews acted in the king’s name.” [170] The endeavor, maintained during the decade after the expulsion, “[perpetuated] resentment of the relationship between Crown and Jews.” [171] When the latter were readmitted in 1315, they were allowed to recover any debt they had been owed before the expulsion, if it had not already been collected by the king, and had to pay him two-thirds of whatever they collected, clearly further evidence, according to Nirenberg, of their status as agents of the king. Lastly, the failure of the Shepherds’ Crusade, seen in particular in the fines imposed on many areas where Jews had been massacred, nourished a “deeper resentment of the Jews.” [172]

50The pattern suggested by Nirenberg seems to present three difficulties: in his perspective, the Pastoureaux’s presumed ability to identify the Jews as fiscal agents of the king [173] appears not to include awareness that the monarch manipulated the Jews to his own financial ends. [174] If awareness of this manipulation does not invalidate the interpretation, how might one understand the Pastoureaux’s attacks on the Jews made so little case of anti-tax sentiment when the first quarter of the fourteenth century was marked by various movements which explicitly challenged royal fiscality, and when allowing the Jews back into the kingdom in 1315 was largely the result of needing to compensate for the income Louis X had been forced to renounce in order, in particular, to calm unrest among the nobility? [175]

51The second problem lies in the link between expulsion and royal protection. Nirenberg remarks that in attacking the Jews the Pastoureaux used the “the very language of sacred monarchy and Crusade that had helped legitimize the fiscality.” [176] By so doing, the rebels exploited the tension between administrative kingship (which protected the Jews in as much as they were its fiscal agents) and sacral kingship (which expelled the Jews to defend the faith). This is a subtle argument, but it ignores the profound changes in the relations between the Jews and the monarchy during this period, alternating expulsions and recalls until 1394. How could the Pastoureaux who, as Nirenberg puts it, “did not need long memories or acute historical sensibilities […] to notice the close connection between the Crown and the Jews” in France, fail to notice the change in that relationship? How are we to understand that the recovery by agents of the crown between 1306 and 1315 of debts owed to the Jews “perpetuated the resentment” created by the ties between the Jews and the king when those ties had been severed by their expulsion? [177] The expulsion order of August 22, 1311 certainly indicates that the return of Jews expelled in 1306 was “tolerated,” “their dreadful crimes having been offset.” [178] It is possible then that the Jews were invited to return after 1306, armed with the loan agreements that may have remained in their possession, to support the agents of the crown in the debt-recovery operation. [179] Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that their provisional readmission [180] into the kingdom could have been seen, after the expulsions of 1306 and 1311, as the consequence of the protection [181] the king gave his “fiscal agents.”

52The link between anti-monarchy dissent and the practice of forced baptism raises one final difficulty. If we follow Nirenberg, forced baptisms would effectively have to be put back into a framework that would be les of a “crusade” than a “revolt against the monarchy.” In this case, the participants would look on the Jews not as victims of specific fiscal oppression and various royal extortion methods, but as representatives of the state tax system. Nirenberg’s analysis would ultimately lead to the causal link between crusade and massacre or forced conversion of the Jews already indentified in 1096 being replaced by the notion that the Jews were attacked in lieu of the authorities—in a surprising shift from “utter subjection” to standing in for the authorities “in their most absolute form,” [182] with no regard for the forms of violence inflicted upon them. In this explanatory pattern, baptism appears as the almost fortuitous form of an act of violence determined merely by the type of victim with no precise reference to the intention of the persecutors: forced baptism did not target the Jews but appeared as the appropriate form of violence done to the king’s fiscal agents in as much as they were Jewish. Manipulating this paradox gives rise to the idea that even the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom in 1306 confirms the fact that the Jews were acting in the name of the king who appropriated the debts they were owed. Forced baptism can be seen at this point as a blind spot. The intentionalist explanation leads to a classic pathway: while popular violence obeys the conscious intention of attacking the usurers from whom the monarchy makes a profit, it does not account for the unique nature of baptism.

53The study of forced baptism sheds light on the problem raised in medieval societies by the persistence of Judaism under a regime of Christian truth and by the practical impossibility of getting rid of it by force. The doctrine of the sacraments failed to act on inner rejection; it did not resolve the paradox that consists in compelling people to believe. The issue of linking theological and legal doctrines to practice was therefore pressing: unlawful but valid, baptism was also indelible but ineffective. It was a pragmatic outcome that only concerned children: only taking them away from their parents ensured the Christian education that gave sense to their baptism. Symbolic constraint became part and parcel of the history of persecution when the desire to eradicate Judaism found expression in the deaths, by massacre or suicide, of adults who refused to be baptized and in the abduction of children baptized against their parents’ will.

54In this light, the issue of the forced baptism of children seems to be favorable ground for wider questions about historians’ distance from their subjects and the way in which their historiographical positioning determines the choice of subject and/or their particular work on the temporality and causality of history. Some recent works on violence claim an attempt at rationalization that seeks to remove affects from the field of historical analysis. This historiographical tendency is not, as might be thought, determined by the will to write after the Shoah a history of the Jews that was not confined solely to persecutions, as evidenced by the emergence prior to it of Baron’s programmatic rejection of the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” The emphasis on Baron’s positions was justified in several ways: the harshness of the terms in which Baron expressed his wish for a historiographical break; the testing of his concepts in his own lifetime; and the “neo-Baronian” uses of his legacy, the observation of which comes before that of the re-use or manipulation of the medieval authorities themselves. Not all the historians mentioned here claimed to be following Baron and their positions should not be confused; the consistency of their analysis within the same framework stems from the problems these positions present to anyone who sets about constructing a history of forced baptisms. Also, it is in a virtually artificial historiographical landscape that the subject has been exposed to the objections, be they general or specific, that it provoked or could provoke.

55The criticism of the teleological perspective implied by opting for the longue durée and the correlated criticism of the anachronism of a judicial perspective stem from a single problem of relating to time, from which comes a problem of interpreting causes, both of them involving the very definition of historical discipline. The rejection of the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” nevertheless gave rise to choices of very different temporalities. Baron’s proposal to give preference to generally peaceful Jewish-Christian relations in the longue durée, masked by sporadic outbursts of violence, thus contrasts with Nirenberg’s promotion of research focused precisely on localised, contextualized “conflicts,” which was intended to break with the dispiriting idea of a continuous and regular increase in “intolerance.” This concern for contextualization is also radically different from the decontextualized interpretations of Yuval. The criticisms of anachronism, on the other hand, are often made by writers who stand alone on judicial ground where they take up the defense of positions favoring forced baptisms on the basis of arguments grounded in the constraint of dogma and the mechanical efficiency of the norms. We hope to have shown that the analysis of the arguments over the longue durée has less to do with anachronistic prejudice than with historical observation of the way they were used and that this observation reveals not only the permanence of certain themes, but also the diversity of positions and the ways in which the norms have been worked on, challenged, reformulated or restructured, given the many ways in which they have found concrete expression. It is from this perspective, in which facts, norms and representations over the long term are combined with contextual singularities, that the history of forced baptisms appears to take on its full meaning, away from a historiographical pathway that seems to avoid the risk of “being lachrymose” by yielding to the temptation of sophistry and the headiness of paradox.