Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France [Course Book ed.] 9781400825257

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: The Medieval Poetry of Jewish Martyrdom
ONE. Faith and Fury: Medieval Jewish Martyrological Poetry and Resistance to Conversion
TWO. “The Fire Does Not Burn”: The Emergence of a Martyrological Motif
THREE. Burning Jewish Books
FOUR. Wheels within Wheels: Literature, History, and Methodology
FIVE. Une Bele Qedushah: Troyes 1288
SIX. Jonathan and His Magic Book: Paris 1290
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

BEAUTIFUL DEATH

JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND MUSLIMS FROM THE ANCIENT TO THE MODERN WORLD SERIES EDITORS

R. Stephen Humphreys, William Chester Jordan, and Peter Sch¨afer

Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. by Seth Schwartz A Shared World? Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean by Molly Greene Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France by Susan L. Einbinder

BEAUTIFUL DEATH JEWISH POETRY AND MARTYRDOM I N M E D I E VA L F R A N C E

Susan L. Einbinder

princeton university press princeton and oxford

COPYRIGHT 䉷 2002. BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA EINBINDER, SUSAN, 1954– BEAUTIFUL DEATH : JEWISH POETRY AND MARTYRDOM IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE / BY SUSAN EINBINDER. P.

CM.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. ISBN 0-691-09053-X 1. HEBREW LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL—FRANCE, NORTHERN—HISTORY AND CRITICISM.

2. MARTYRDOM IN LITERATURE.

3. MARTYRDOM—

JUDAISM. 4. JUDAISM—FRANCE, NORTHERN—HISTORY—TO 1500. 5. JEWS— FRANCE, NORTHERN—HISTORY—TO 1500. 6. JEWS—PERSECUTIONS—FRANCE, NORTHERN.

I. TITLE.

PJ5023 .E46 2002 892.4⬘0938296—DC21

2001055409

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN GALLIARD PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER. ⬁ WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1 10

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For my parents, Seymour and Julia Einbinder

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION

The Medieval Poetry of Jewish Martyrdom

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ONE

Faith and Fury: Medieval Jewish Martyrological Poetry and Resistance to Conversion 17 TWO

“The Fire Does Not Burn”: The Emergence of a Martyrological Motif 45 THREE

Burning Jewish Books

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FOUR

Wheels within Wheels: Literature, History, and Methodology 100 FIVE

Une Bele Qedushah: Troyes 1288

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Jonathan and His Magic Book: Paris 1290

Epilogue 180 Bibliography 189 Index 211

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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NSURPRISINGLY, the debts accrued in the making of this book are numerous. On several occasions, Heather Arden of the University of Cincinnati offered assistance and clarification with Old French texts, as did Adam Kamesar, Bill Jordan, and Hebrew Union College graduate students Charles Ramsey and Ting Wang with Latin. Mark Cohen of Princeton University and Michael Chernick of Hebrew Union College in New York both provided bibliographic assistance when I was away from my home library in Cincinnati. Jay Zumeta of the Cincinnati Art Academy offered both time and slide resources when I was seeking representations of the Paris 1290 libel, and Adelaide Bennett of the Index for Christian Art provided invaluable aid during my visit to the Index in the spring of 2001. Indeed, I owe deep thanks to the librarians of many institutions. On the Hebrew Union College–Cincinnati library staff, I am particularly grateful to Noni Rudavsky and Bernie Rabenstein, and to the director emeritus of the college library, Herbert Zafren. Nancy Pressman-Levy at Princeton University’s Firestone Library forestalled many a headache accessing their newly recatalogued Hebrew collection, and Jean Houston at the National Humanities Center found herself “point-man” for handling Hebrew requests, a burden she assumed with unfailing grace. The Cincinnati Public Library and staff were also of great assistance. Both the Shelby Collum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, provided the precious settings and time for much of the writing of this book. The equally precious gift of companionship and conversation I found in both institutions was and will remain a highlight of my academic experience. In this regard, I am grateful also to the Hebrew Union College for granting me leave for the academic year of 1999–2000 so that I might avail myself of the grants offered by Princeton and the NHC. The College-Institute’s publications committee also provided support for reproduction of illustrations and a map. My National Humanities Center fellowship was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I thank for its investment both in me and in other scholars over the years. My students in Cincinnati have listened to some of the ideas presented in this book, to its betterment, and my emeritus colleague, Ezra Spicehandler, read much martyrological poetry with me as this project took shape. Certainly many new friends and old listened, corrected, and coaxed me along the way— among them Peter Brown, Stuart Clark, Tom Head, Steven Kaufman, Ivan Marcus, Arno Mayer, Michael Signer, David Sperling, Ken Stow,

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Michael Thelwell, John Van Engen, Elliot Wolfson, and Jorie Woods. Colleagues Jonathan Cohen and Mark Washofsky helped me untangle several responsa, and David Aaron did a lot of listening. Joan Ferrante has been an ongoing inspiration, and Bill Jordan has encouraged this project—and me—from its infancy. I am deeply grateful for Bill’s suggestions, guidance, and criticism, and for his generosity as a friend. Other friends from beyond the world of the university have helped in different ways; I mention only a few here, such as Blanche Castleberry, Peg Edwards, Saul Lambert, Jane Lury, Frank Miceli, and my sister, Shelley Einbinder. Bill Farmer has been in all ways a friend and support whose kindness, counsel, patience, and love have immeasurably enriched my life. Brigitta van Rheinberg, Carol Hagan, Marsha A. Kunin, and the staff of the Princeton University Press have brought this book into being. I am grateful to Diana Witt for producing the index. And finally, thank you to Hildegard, my small but constant friend, who with Rory, Beta, and Gateway, offered an ever-consoling feline perspective.

BEAUTIFUL DEATH

INTRODUCTION THE MEDIEVAL POETRY OF JEWISH MARTYRDOM [E]veryone wants What he did to be remembered a long time after The things he didn’t do are forgotten. —Natan Zach

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HIS IS A BOOK about poetry and history, about what people did and how they wanted to remember doing it. It is about poems that turned to passion and polemic in the wake of violence, shaping people’s responses to the incidents they described in their own time and for generations to come. The events in question began in the spring of 1096, when Crusader armies passing through the Rhine Valley on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities that lay in their path. An outpouring of commemorative literature—prose chronicles, martyrological rosters, and verse laments—for the victims appeared soon after. This literature also preserved accounts of many Jews who, faced with the furious mobs of crusaders and local reinforcements, preferred to kill themselves and their families rather than let the Christians determine their fate. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born and, with the descriptions of their deeds, so was medieval Jewish martyrology. By the second half of the twelfth century, the Jewish poetry of martyrdom formalized an ideal of Jewish resistance to persecution and conversionary pressures. The poems of martyrdom commemorated Jewish victims as figures of exceptional piety and courage who put virtue to the ultimate test and “sanctified the Name” in death. They also reinforced the positive values that might deter attrition, especially among the most vulnerable elements of Jewish society, while drawing ever more boldly the border between Christian and Jew. In so doing, the poems memorialized as heroes the men and women who achieved the poetic ideal while consigning to oblivion those who did not. At the same time, the poetry of martyrdom, despite its preoccupation with heroic deeds, reveals some of the daily concerns and values that characterized medieval Jewish life. And yet, the Hebrew poetry of martyrdom from medieval northern Europe has rarely been considered a source of information about the

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“everyday life” of its authors or audiences. I shall explore some of the reasons for this below. As a way of beginning, however, let me emphasize that the following studies assume that Jewish martyrological poetry, like the spectrum of martyrological rituals, beliefs, and behaviors that included this poetry, is not solely concerned with the facts of martyrdom. For the Jews of northern Europe, martyrology was not merely a way of making sense of the traumatic events that struck so many Jewish individuals and communities over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Martyrological symbols and rituals, narratives and poetry, transmitted a picture of idealized Jewish living as well as a prescription for idealized Jewish death. They also reflected, in part through poems like those we shall be exploring, communal values and an ideal of social order that drew on contemporary non-Jewish models as well as particularly Jewish ones. These values and ideals were intended to be meaningful for a range of listeners, from the highly literate class of male scholars to less learned Jewish men, women, and children. Their Christian neighbors may have viewed them as strangers, but most of these Jews were the descendents of families that had lived in northern Europe for generations; the landscape and customs of the region had had many long years to shape their mental horizons and outlooks as well as the rhythms of their daily lives.1 Three twelfth-century sources, all deriving from the school of Eleazar of Worms, trace the origins of Jewish communities in the Rhineland (known in Hebrew as the land of Ashkenaz) to a cordial invitation and charter from Charlemagne to an e´ migr´e group of Italian Jews. This claim is not taken seriously by historians, who nonetheless generally concur that the legend contains kernels of truth. The arrival in the early tenth century of members of the Qalonymos family of Italy may have been connected to the efforts of the early Carolingian rulers to encourage economic growth in the region. Small Jewish communities continued to take root along the Rhine, the Seine, and the Loire over the next century. Most were anchored in the trading activities of a few major families, the Qalonymos family prominent among them.2 Pope Urban II’s call to crusade in 1095 did not include any instructions to attack Jewish communities throughout the Rhine, but in town after town, Jewish settlements were the targets of violence. Although scholars differ in their assessment of the permanent damage caused by these attacks, most agree that crusader and mob assaults on Jewish life and property changed the balance of Jewish-Christian relations.3 French Jews were largely spared in 1096, but they would experience mob violence firsthand during the Second Crusade (1144–47). Moreover, news traveled fast between Ashkenaz and northern France. Since the days of the scholar and exegete of Troyes, R. Solomon bar Isaac (known as

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Rashi—d.1105), the schools of the northern French rabbis had gained renown in northern Europe. Their dialectical methods of reconciling discordant talmudic texts and traditions reached its apex two generations after Rashi, in the work of his grandsons R. Samuel ben Meir and R. Jacob Tam and their peers.4 During the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many of the leading rabbis of Ashkenaz came to France to study in their youth. The commercial networks of French and Rhenish Jews were as far ranging as their intellectual ones, and their leading families were often related by blood (or marriage) as well. The shock of the 1096 violence, as that of later tragedies, reverberated swiftly beyond the sites of crusader bloodshed.5 By the mid–twelfth century, however, mob violence and crusader attacks were not the only threat to Jewish security and survival. From Norwich, England, in 1144, came the first recorded instance of an accusation of ritual murder against local Jews, in this case alleging that the Norwich Jews had murdered a young boy named William for ritual purposes. By the early thirteenth century, accusations of ritual murder began to include charges that the Jews sought Christian blood for religious and medicinal uses. The blood libel became a frequent catalyst to tragedy in Jewish communities, invariably leading to arrests and interrogations, and often confessions made under torture. If the Jews were lucky, a huge fine or ransom could terminate the judicial proceedings there, but more often, such a payment merely followed the execution of the unfortunate accused at the stake. Over time, the murder or blood libel expanded to include accusations of ritual crucifixion, cannibalism, and finally host desecration. Many individual incidents, and indeed the phenomenon of the libel accusations itself, have been treated in detail by historians.6 Notably, the Jewish men and women who met their deaths as the result of such accusations were the victims of judicial (secular and ecclesiastical) violence and not the victims of mob attacks. The poetry that commemorates their martyrdom likewise responds to a change in the nature of antiJewish violence. Indeed, Jews themselves—and not just their poetry—responded to persecution in a variety of ways. Some never gave in, remaining Jews despite increasing antipathy from their neighbors, economic instability, and actual violence. Under relentless economic, spiritual, and physical pressure, some converted to Christianity. Most Jewish men and women, until confronted with the stark choice between conversion and death, continued to adapt and to struggle to survive. People married and had children, ran businesses, studied and prayed. Some wrote ledger notes and some wrote talmudic commentaries or poems. Some acquired great learning and wealth, and others never did. Everywhere about them were the signs of a cultural renaissance, characterized by new forms of litera-

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ture, music, art and fashion, new methods of scholarship and increasingly efficient methods of administration. Medieval Jews participated in these changes as well, benefiting from some of them, absorbing others unconsciously, and earning greater visibility and vulnerability as a result of still others. It is no coincidence that when Louis IX and his followers thought of France as a holy and chosen nation, the Jews of the royal domain likewise considered themselves an exemplary and holy Jewish community whose fate would signify sanctity to future generations.7 Even when they might seem most to be at odds with it, medieval Jews were woven securely into the fabric of the institutional, intellectual, and social tapestry of Christian-dominated Europe. And yet, unlike scholars of medieval Jewish life and culture in Muslim lands, the scholars who have studied Jewish communities and literature from medieval Ashkenaz and northern France have tended to treat their subject matter in isolation from developments in the surrounding world. Thus, for instance, they have explained the rise of Hebrew martyrological literature in this period—after a millennium of no martyrological writing at all—as a revival of rabbinic motifs and traditions, resuscitated in times of persecution. The rabbinic precedents available to medieval Jewish writers are certainly of interest to our study. For a Jewish author in twelfth- or thirteenthcentury northern Europe, these precedents were few but notable. They included the rabbinic descriptions of the “Ten Martyrs” of the Hadrianic persecutions of the second century and medieval Hebrew translations of some of the martyrological legends to be found in Josephus and the books of Maccabees, including the legend of Hannah (or Miriam) and her seven sons.8 No doubt the medieval authors drew on these traditions, many of which echo in their works. But it would distort the meaning of the medieval genre to treat it solely as a derivation of ancient motifs. Even if rabbinic precedents could entirely explain medieval Jewish martyrological composition, those precedents have traveled far from their original settings. So if, for instance, being burned with one’s book was a martyrological ideal with deep Jewish roots, locating and describing the roots does not account fully for the leaves and branches that emerged once those roots were transplanted to medieval soil. The ancient precedent has become entwined with contemporary motifs and attitudes: A belief in the incombustibility of a sacred book or righteous person owed much to contemporary Christian models of sanctity and beliefs. So, too, a lament addressed to a personified book, such as that written by Meir of Rothenburg following the burning of the Talmud in 1242, does not just represent an innovative extension of these same rabbinic legends. Rather, Meir’s poem must be understood in its social and literary context. What do we know about other poems that describe book burnings (and hence,

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the phenomenon of book burning itself)? And what do we know about contemporary poems that addressed personified objects or idealized feminine figures (from Guinevere to the Virgin)?9 The importation of courtly language and imagery into Jewish martyrology raises other questions. What are we to make of a Jewish martyrological lament in Old French, for instance, that describes one martyr’s death with a phrase from the Chanson de Roland? Clearly, the identification of rabbinic sources used in medieval martyrological poems provides only one piece of a much larger puzzle. That martyrological literature responded to contemporary ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and modes of representation should come as no surprise. The innovations of peshat exegesis associated with the school of Rashi, his sons-in-law and grandsons, reflect the interest in narrative sequence and dialectic characteristic of twelfth-century Christian exegesis and narrative prose.10 The compendiums of Jewish religious rulings known as responsa contain many anecdotes and formulations that illustrate the intersection of Jewish and Christian lives, at times also testifying to a lively sense of narrative style. While some of these intersections were marked by suspicion and hostility, others document a remarkable and often intimate weave of familiarity and interdependence. Similarly, homiletic and didactic texts preserve sermonic exempla and moral tales that illustrate the concerns of Jewish society but also its conscious and unconscious absorption of cultural motifs (both popular and elite) from Christian neighbors.11 One sign of the impact of cultural developments on Jewish medieval writers in Germany and northern France was the appearance of Hebrew prose. Rhymed prose narratives, known as maqamat (singular: maqama) had been a feature of Hebrew belles lettres in the East and in Spain for a while. With the exception of a few works like the Megillat Aខhima’atz, the Sefer Yosippon, or the parodic account of the life of Jesus known as the Toldot Yeshu, however, narrative prose was not among the genres pursued by medieval Jewish authors in northern Europe. Hence, part of the significance of the three Hebrew chronicles of First Crusade attacks lies in their use of prose. What, however, was done with the prose chronicles, which survive in a unique and battered manuscript copy, is not clear. Gerson Cohen believed they were used as liturgical commentaries on the martyrological laments they often framed, although there is no record of their having served this purpose.12 It is just as possible that they were school texts, as we find was true of the combined prose and verse format in Latin instructional texts of the time.13 Whatever their use, the emergence of Hebrew prose cannot be explained purely as a literary response to persecution. As students of the vernacular literatures know, the rhymed prose romances of the twelfth century, like the prose historical chronicles and the written chanson de geste cycles in the thirteenth, or the

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shift in vernacular hagiography from verse to prose, are all hallmarks of this extended period. Jews who thought in Old French expressed themselves in ways shaped by common narrative conventions; it was no large step to import narrative prose into Hebrew. From this perspective, the more interesting question is not why medieval northern European Jews wrote narrative prose, but why they did not write more of it.14 The answer must be that in some way, their poetry told them what they wanted to know. Yet, perhaps because of the relative commonness of prose in the modern West, modern scholars have lost sight of the fact that poetry remained the dominant medium for martyrological writing among medieval northern European Jews. Indeed, the vast majority of medieval Jews encountered martyrological texts in the synagogue—that is, as liturgical poetry—and not in prose at all. This is one reason that the corpus of martyrological poetry treated in this book is important for understanding the range and depth of martyrological concepts among medieval Jews. At the same time, this corpus provides an opportunity to assess the role of the martyr-figure in communicating social and religious ideals (some of which had little to do with martyrdom per se) and in mediating their conflicting or contradictory aspects. Hebrew martyrological poetry has not received much attention as poetry, for a number of reasons. Some have to do with aesthetics, some with genre and historiography. In the first case, most scholars have not thought of this poetry as very “good” literature. In contrast to Hebrew poetry from medieval Spain and other Muslim lands, elegance is rarely a term used to describe the poetic compositions authored in northern France and the Rhineland. The dazzling literary accomplishments of medieval Spanish Jewry are well known, and have aptly earned the period the title of a Golden Age. At the same time, the standards set by this poetry for aesthetic excellence reflect many of the ideals of beauty and streamlined elegance appreciated by Western readers—euphony, regularized metrical patterns (derived from Arabic prosody) and clear block composition with a single rhyme or stanzaic compositions with multiple rhymes, often with refrains. The language of Andalusian Hebrew poetry, in conformity with its writers’ belief in the stylistic sublimity of the Hebrew Bible, is almost entirely biblical and readily comprehensible to any reader familiar with that text.15 Perhaps just as significant was the fact that a good proportion of medieval Hebrew verse from Spain was secular, touching on themes of love and praise, wine, wisdom, and satire. The Andalusian Jewish courtier-poet and his wry yet graceful verse suited Enlightenment notions of art and beauty well. In contrast, Hebrew verse from northern France and Ashkenaz was never, in the ordinary sense of the word, secular; the few surviving exemplars of Hebrew secular poetry from this region and period are noted

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more as curiosities than as art.16 For the most part, Hebrew poetry from medieval northern Europe is liturgical, and it drew largely on models inherited from Jewish writers in the Byzantine East, who favored metrically irregular and formally baroque styles. Sometimes the verses of this poetry are organized by verbal stress patterns and acrostics, sometimes by a regular number of words or syllables per line. Occasionally the French and Ashkenazic poets attempted to imitate the quantitative metrical patterns of Andalusian verse. Indeed, the poets associated with the Tosafist schools of northern France seem to have had a predilection for experimenting with Spanish meters and verse forms. This interest in importing fashionable new verse models testifies to Tosafist awareness of intellectual trends in neighboring Spain and is yet another mark of the openness of the Tosafist circles to innovation. Many of these efforts produced erratic results, leading scholars to conclude that somehow the poets were “unable” to grasp the new technique. Why men who could work with the exceedingly complex verse forms inherited from the East might be unable to grasp the principle of counting syllables is not a question that seems to have occurred to these scholars. What is at stake here, however, must not be a matter of skill so much as one of stylistic preference. The melody of the texts must also have exerted a force on the meter of the verses, and unfortunately the melodies of the texts are lost. It seems unlikely that the Arabic music that accompanied Andalusian Hebrew lyrics, and which reinforced their quantitative prosody, was sung in Cologne or Orl´eans. The prosodic efforts of the Tosafist poets surely tapped indigenous musical traditions, according to which regular meters may have been unnecessary. Another difficulty posed by most Ashkenazic liturgical composition, like its Eastern models, is its reliance on rabbinic as well as biblical Hebrew, with a concomitant fondness for neologisms and abstruse allusions. The disparaging comments of Abraham Ibn Ezra, the twelfthcentury Spanish exegete and poet, about the verses of Eleazer bar Kallir, one of the great paytanim (singular: paytan, a writer of piyyut, or liturgical poetry), indicate that the Andalusian Jewish elite had little appreciation for the old style of poetry.17 In this regard, too, the Spanish standard was upheld by later scholars, beginning with the nineteenth-century German-Jewish philologists who assembled and edited the works of the great Golden Age poets. In general, late nineteenth-century scholars, engaged in their own struggles for cultural and national definition, projected a utopian vision of convivencia and sublimity onto their reconstruction of Jewish life and literature in Muslim Spain.18 These same scholars, furthermore, expressed greater enthusiasm for vernacular writing, with its implications of national consciousness, than for writing in literary tongues. In this context, the fate of

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a unique pair of poems from the late thirteenth century is telling. An otherwise unknown Jewish poet, Jacob bar Judah of Lorraine, composed two laments for the martyrs of Troyes burned in 1288, one in Hebrew and one in Old French. Respected scholars like Ernest R´enan and Ars`ene Darmesteter praised the vernacular poem lavishly, while pronouncing the Hebrew “one of the least bad” of its type.19 In sum, an aesthetic bias has prevented scholars from seeing the liturgical poetry from Rhenish or northern French communities as either beautiful (meriting attention for its literary excellence) or cultured (defined largely as a secular term).20 This bias was reinforced by an underlying sense that communities under siege could hardly have been characterized by a thriving or vital degree of interaction with the cultural developments around them. Certainly persecution and social disruption are not recipes for flourishing literary creativity. But we would do well to remember that violence against the Jewish communities of northern Europe was sporadic and rarely dealt a deathblow to an entire local population. In the end, the systematic policies of harassment, repression, and ultimately expulsion had more of a deleterious effect than isolated outbreaks of violence on literary and cultural activity.21 Significantly, much of the period that concerns us is renowned among Western scholars for its remarkable literary and cultural activity, both in the intellectual centers of the French universities and in the lively courts of the French aristocracy. At least three of the incidents discussed in detail in this book took place in important cultural centers—Blois, Troyes, and Paris, all known for their literary accomplishment. This is one reason this book focuses on northern France, the region associated with the vernacular and cultural flowering known as the twelfth-century renaissance. And yet, until recently, scholars of Jewish history have persisted in viewing thriving Jewish communities as insulated from the developments and ideas so inextricably a part of their environment. In the spirit of the recent work that has sought to redress this insular perspective, this book assumes that Hebrew martyrological literature offers evidence of a high degree of Jewish engagement with the stylistic trends and thematic preoccupations attested in Christian literature and life. Medieval Hebrew poetry from northern Europe poses a number of challenging questions. One, related to its language and style, concerns its medieval audience. A study that is restricted to texts alone can draw only tentative conclusions about the impact of martyrological literature and thought on Jews outside the circle of a skilled group of readers. One of the claims of this book is that changes in the literary conventions that characterize Jewish martyrological poetry reflect changes in the historical conditions of persecution and Jewish perception of and response to those conditions. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the audience capable of

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deciphering the texts of the poetry remains more or less consistent— male, highly literate graduates of the Tosafist schools of northern France and Ashkenaz.22 For this audience, questions of theophany and covenant, religious authority and obedience, election and suffering, had meaning within a context and vocabulary shaped by centuries of textual tradition. Within this linguistic system, variations in an anticipated convention, or mutations in conventions over time, offer clues to changes in cultural attitudes. To some extent, advances in the study of Christian hagiography in this period are helpful, because (among other things) they document trends and motifs in the dominant culture. It is also helpful to remember that the text of the martyrological poem, rather like a disinterred skeleton, preserves only the outlines of its medieval life. We must look elsewhere to imagine its flesh and motion in a living world. In other words, although modern scholars have tended to look upon the poetic laments chiefly as texts, for the medieval Jew texts were only one strand of a densely textured experience. Many of these poems come down to us with indications that they were to be inserted in liturgical ceremonies for penitential fast days; some still supply the names of the melodies (unfortunately lost) to which they would have been sung. To borrow from Clifford Geertz’s formulation, the liturgical performance of these martyrological hymns offered “not only models of what to believe but also models for the believing of it.” In other words, martyrological ritual embodied a type of dramatic performance through which “men [might] attain their faith as they portray it.”23 From this perspective, the poetry of martyrdom appears as part of a rich symbolic system that wrestled with the disjunction of theological claims and historical realities faced by northern European Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. How could medieval Jews in France, England, and Germany reconcile their profound certainty in their righteousness and election in the face of daily humiliation and persecution, even death at the hands of their foes? How could the attractions of Christian culture be acknowledged while remaining vigilant to its dangers? And on yet another level, how could the leaders and institutions of the Jewish community maintain authority while combatting defection from their own elite ranks? All of these concerns find an echo in the martyrological poetry, and in the evolving ways in which it represented the ideal martyr and his or her death.24 At the same time, it should be emphasized that if the martyr of the commemorative laments was a powerful symbol in medieval Jewish life, the martyr him- or herself was quite real.25 Indeed, if medieval Jewish martyrology shared a number of overlapping ideals, concerns, and stylistic techniques with its contemporary Christian analogue, in this respect

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it operated under a condition uniquely its own. The Christian martyrological literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries valorized the faith of Christian heroes of the Roman past. Jewish martyrology responded to present events. In some form, listeners recognized and mourned the men and women it memorialized as real people who had existed outside the texts. As we shall see, the tendency of late twelfthcentury poetry to depict the idealized martyr as a scholar and religious authority diverged from the commitment of the 1096 poetry to a demographically diverse representation of the victims of anti-Jewish violence. I understand this change in emphasis as one way to reinforce images of religious authority. The following chapters claim also that the ideal of the scholar-martyr reflects the concern of the scholarly poets for their young students, who were primary targets for Christian conversionary efforts and too often susceptible to them. How this poetry worked, in other words, and what it sought to do, are the kinds of questions this book asks. Yet another obstacle that has hindered appreciation of the Hebrew martyrological laments originates with scholars of history and not literature. Historians have not traditionally been concerned with aesthetic arguments, but with recovering evidence toward the reconstruction and understanding of past events. To this end, they have turned to both the prose and poetic accounts of persecution, plundering these texts for “facts.” In the case of the prose, which looks more like a narrative record of events than does poetry, historians have tended to read medieval accounts of persecution and martyrdom as if they were documentary records. In this regard, scholars have often forgotten that realism, too, is a style, and one favored by twelfth-century writers, especially in prose. The description of a woman martyr who spits upon her accusers (or at a crucifix) may, for instance, appear to be a realistic stroke of portraiture. But the discovery of the same description in several sources ranging over a century and a half suggests that the writers have invoked a literary topos. Or, as another example, the overwhelming presence of married and pregnant women martyrs in Jewish texts may reveal less about Jewish demographics than about a Jewish feminine ideal—one in sharp, perhaps even polemical, contrast to the virgin saints and martyrs of Christianity.26 To say that even the prose accounts of persecution and martyrdom rely on literary conventions that shape their presentation of “facts” does not imply that the medieval authors were fabricating events that never happened; artistic shaping is not the same as fictionalization.27 Rather, the medieval writers described the traumatic events whose memory they wished to preserve by highlighting certain elements and suppressing others, in keeping with the meaning they wished to attribute to those

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events and to convey to their listeners. By suggesting that a focus on some of the literary features of the martyrological poetry might be helpful, I am not seeking to remove these poems from the domain of history so much as to provide a new perspective from which to view them.28 Undoubtedly, the near extinction of European Jewry in the mid–twentieth century has made more plausible the kind of determinist reading in which medieval persecutions seem seismic and anticipatory echoes of the cataclysm to come.29 But even in the late nineteenth century, as mentioned above, a specific view of Jewish history colored what historians sought to find in the medieval texts they had to hand. For scholars of medieval Christian Europe—in contradistinction to what transpired in Muslim lands—“culture” was ineluctably a response to persecution, perhaps exclusively a function of persecution. The great historian Salo Baron would later dismiss this theory of culture as the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history.30 In the case of the martyrological corpus, the implications are clear. Many of the editions of medieval martyrological poetry and prose date to either the period when the “lachrymose” theory was formulated (in the late nineteenth century) or to the middle years of the twentieth century, when it seemed to be proven. As a consequence, certain modern scholars, who are (quite correctly) interested in positing a more balanced and nuanced account of medieval Jewish cultural developments, have been hesitant to pay undue attention to martyrological texts. Yet this reluctance, I think, over-reads this literature’s focus on martyrdom—as if war stories were exclusively about war, and not about heroism and meaning in pacific settings as well. The renaissance in hagiographical studies over the last quarter century surely has bearing on this question, and offers hope as well as promise. In any event, the martyrological literature exists, and represents a literary corpus treasured by medieval European Jews in their own time, long before it would serve Jews in other centuries with other needs. It is part of a full spectrum of literature and life, some of it lived in the shadow of great tribulation, but all of it bearing witness to a remarkable blend of cultural tastes and trends. Not a single listener to Jacob bar Judah’s Old French lament for the martyrs of Troyes would have rejected—or misunderstood—the poet’s description of a bele qedushah, a “beautiful martyrdom.” Perhaps more than any phrase preserved among the martyrological laments, this hybrid expression encapsulates the unique synthesis of medieval French-Jewish life. Unselfconsciously, the expression mingles values from vernacular and holy languages, secular and sacred worlds, Christian and Jewish traditions. Jews up until our own day have revered the ideal of pious martyrdom, and sometimes they have emulated it. But only in Capetian France, in the heart of the vernacular renaissance that

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INTRODUCTION

brought deeds of glory and love from the courts of kings and queens to the taverns, would they call “beautiful” the death of those who died for their love of God. The following studies focus on different aspects of the issues mentioned. The first chapter is introductory, while chapters 2 through 5 move in chronological order through a series of specific incidents that were commemorated by martyrological laments. Chapter 6 also treats an incident of Jewish martyrdom, but one for which there is no Jewish record, only a Christian one; however, the Christian documents in this case may inadvertently preserve evidence of a literary motif found in Jewish martyrological writing. Briefly, chapter 1 provides an overview of the place of martyrological poetry in medieval Jewish society. In this chapter, I claim that this poetry was one aspect of a multifaceted response of the rabbis to persecution and to conversionary pressures. In fact, the stylistic features and some of the motifs in Hebrew martyrological poetry suggest that its textual matter targeted an audience characterized by a high level of linguistic sophistication and a high susceptibility to images of vulgarity and pollution. That audience would likely have been comprised of the adolescent and young male students of the Tosafist schools. The martyrological laments also show signs of change over time, so that the earlier poems commemorating victims of judicial violence, such as the laments for the Blois martyrs of 1171, construct determined portrayals of martyrdom in ways calculated to overlay images of death with associative images of covenantal renewal. As the cumulative and disruptive effects of persecution took their toll, these associative images give way in the poetry to images of personal transfiguration in the agony of death. Chapter 2 treats the seven known laments for the martyrs of Blois (1171), which mark the emergence of an important martyrological motif. The Blois poems contain the first poetic reference to a Jewish belief in the martyr’s immunity to flame and offer an opportunity to examine the early use of this motif, which will recur in later poetry and episodes, although its significance changes over time. Chapter 3 was originally conceived to cover a gap in the number of martyrological poems from northern France that could definitively be assigned to the first half of the thirteenth century. There are many good reasons for the dearth of martyrological texts from this period and region, beginning with the instability of Jewish life in France following the return of French Jews after the expulsion of 1182–98. The periodic conflagration of Jewish books after the condemnation and burning of the Talmud in 1242 did not improve conditions for preserving Hebrew literature. As a striking lament to survive from France in this period, Meir of Rothenburg’s 1242 lament for the burning of the Talmud seemed a promising anchor for a study, especially as it draws on a number of martyrological

INTRODUCTION

13

conventions. Significantly, when Meir wrote this lament, he was still a young student in Paris, and hence an ideal representative of the group chapters 1 and 3 posited as the primary audience of martyrological poetry. Moreover, although this poem has been treated as sui generis, it pays homage to major themes in contemporary Jewish and Christian literature, from beloved ladies to burning books. Thus this chapter evolved into a study of the cultural and literary context of this lament as a way of assessing the worldview of the young Tosafist students. One of the deterrents to scholars who would like to make use of the hundreds of martyrological poems to survive from this period is their highly stylized presentation of events. Without supplementary documentation from other, nonpoetic, sources, it is often difficult to decipher the kinds of details that historians, even literary historians, seek in order to make sense of their texts. In chapter 4, I use the example of one such poem to discuss some of the methodological problems that arise in treating this poetry, and the effect that conversion at its peak had on the literary conventions of the poems and hence on the sensibilities of their audience. The lament that forms the center of this discussion is a commemorative poem for a martyr named Samson, who was burned in Metz in 1276. Chapter 5 returns to a specific incident of human martyrdom, the burning of thirteen Jews in Troyes in 1288, for which we have five martyrological laments and fragments of external documentation. In this chapter, I return to the available historical evidence to try to better understand the context of the libel accusation that led to the arrest and execution of the Troyes Jews, as well as to the rich poetic corpus the episode inspired. Here, again, we see the image of the fireproof martyr, albeit in changed significance from its use in the Blois laments. And because the Troyes laments include an Old French lament for the martyrs, we can compare the development of martyrological conventions in Hebrew with their expression in the vernacular. Chronologically, the Troyes laments also mark a later moment in northern French Jewish life, after the midcentury peak in conversion but amid other signs of disintegration. Chapter 6 treats an incident that took place only two years after the burning in Troyes, focusing on the first recorded incident of a host desecration libel, at Paris in 1290. In the spring of 1290, a Parisian Jewish moneylender named Jonathan was accused of torturing a eucharistic host acquired from a desperate woman client, and he was burned at the stake. Jonathan’s story has been amply treated by historians.31 What has been ignored, however, is a strange request made by the condemned Jew when he was brought to the stake. According to a Christian chronicler writing soon after the event, Jonathan surprised his executioner by asking to be

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INTRODUCTION

burned with his book—a book, he claimed, that would make him incombustible. The book was retrieved by the Christian authorities, bound to Jonathan and both set aflame. The man and his book burned to ashes. Jonathan’s story preserves motifs that are woven throughout this book, where the fates of burning books and burning men and women have intersected in several chapters. The curious request directs us to a variety of ancient and medieval Jewish texts as well as beyond them, to ask how martyrological beliefs influenced the thinking—and action—of ordinary Jews. Hopefully, together these studies will help us to reconstruct something of the world in which a Jewish poet could name the ideal of a bele qedushah, a beautiful death, and his listeners could understand that ideal to convey a message of consolation, triumph, and hope. Hopefully, also, future studies will take off from this beginning, deepen whatever insights these pages hold, and correct their errors. One claim, at least, I would like to believe that time will not alter, and that is the claim that the Jewish martyrological poets of medieval northern Europe have left us a powerful body of literature. Some of these poets were good poets, some were better, and some were worse. But together, they sought to make sense of the deeds of their enemies and their own responses, to mark the limits of human weakness and strength, and to maintain faith with the inscrutable, almighty God whose collision with their lives had taken such a tragic toll. Yet, in the world where a “beautiful death” was not only thinkable but often embraced, these poets and their poetry struggled to convey to their immediate listeners and beyond that the ultimate gesture of human faith in a violent and mystifying world was one of beauty and love. How they said this is, in brief, the subject of this book.

Notes 1. For a general history of Jewish settlement in northern Europe and in northern France particularly, see Chazan, 1973a; Jordan, 1989; Stow, 1992. See also Jordan, 1998, pp. 27–45. 2. For a review and analysis of the sources, see Grossman, 1989, introduction and first chapter; and 1975, pp.154–85; Marcus, 1981. For a legendary account of the same geographical movement, see Gerson D. Cohen, 1960–61, pp. 55– 131; Marcus, 1990, pp. 365–88; and Stow, 1992. Abraham Grossman has claimed the same pattern for the transfer of martyrological motifs in “The Roots of Martyrdom in Early Ashkenaz,” 1993, pp. 99–130. As shown by Amy Remensnyder, 1995, Charlemagne was a popular figure in monastic foundation myths, too; her study focuses on monasteries of southwestern France. 3. Chazan, 1973a and 1987; Soloveitchik, 1998. 4. Urbach, 1955; Kanarfogel, 1993.

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5. See Simha Goldin, 1996a. 6. For several detailed case studies, see Langmuir, 1990a. See also Langmuir’s more metahistorical treatment in History, Religion and AntiSemitism, 1990b. For a study of the libel in the early modern period, see Po-chia Hsia. 7. Strayer, 1971a, pp. 239–50. 8. It is not clear that they were aware of Josephus’ account of the mass suicide at Masada, for instance. For the Ten Martyrs, see B. Avodah Zara 18a, or the poetic version preserved in the “Eleh ezkerah,” the text of which may be found in the Sefer haDema’ot, ed. Bernfeld, 1:103. Regarding the circulation of these and other martyrological traditions, see Grossman, 1993; Gerson Cohen, 1953, Hebrew section, pp.109–112; Bowman. 9. See, for the first instance, some of the rhetorical examples (such as the lament of the Cross) used by Geoffrey of Vinsauf in his poetic treatise, the Poetria Nova. See Woods and Copeland; I thank Professor Woods also for making available her work-in-progress on Geoffrey of Vinsauf and the Poetria Nova. 10. Grossman, 1997; Abulafia, 1995; Dahan, 1990a. For specific studies of the relationship between Scholastic and peshat exegesis, see Signer, 1982, 1988, 1993. 11. See, for instance, Dan, 1971; Alexander. For examples from the folk literature, see Gaster, or more recently, Yassif, 1999. For a recent cross-cultural study, see Ivan Marcus, 1996. 12. Gerson Cohen, 1993. 13. Woods (forthcoming): “the format of prose instruction combined with verse examples” was a characteristic of some of the rhetorical texts of the time and made them highly “suitable for the classroom.” 14. For one scholar’s discussion of this question, see Yerushalmi, 1982. 15. Brann; Scheindlin, 1980, 1994. 16. Habermann, 1945b, pp. 289–98. 17. See Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary to Eccles. 5:1; his position is expanded in his philological works, the Safah berurah and Sefat-yeter. For full citations and an analysis of their significance, see Yahalom. 18. Mark Cohen comments: “In short, the very Jewish historians who created what Salo Baron disparagingly calls ‘the lachrymose conception of Jewish history’ in Christian Europe also invented its counterpoint: the ‘myth of the interfaith utopia’ in Islam” (3). 19. The phrase is R´enan’s, p. 478, and see Darmesteter, 1874, p. 6. 20. As recently as 1997, in fact, in its advertisement for a theme year on “Hebrew poetry and culture,” the Center for Advanced Jewish Study at the University of Pennsylvania mentioned only medieval Spain and Renaissance Italy, eliding altogether medieval Christian Europe. 21. For a detailed study of Capetian policies and their effects, see Jordan, 1989. 22. Note Wolfson’s comment with respect to kabbalistic literature, where the restriction of authors and audience to men trained to read rabbinic texts led to very “little change with regard to the major themes that engaged their imagination.” Wolfson, 2000. According to Wolfson, had “conditions been more diverse, the range of attitudes reflected in the sources would have been wider. But the historical reality is that in the formative period of kabbalistic symbolism such

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variety in social context is absent. I sympathize with the contemporary tendency to seek multiple voices in the reading of texts, and I applaud the attempt to avoid a totalizing and reductive hermeneutic. However, in the case of traditional kabbalistic sources, I submit that the general invariability and redundancy are due to male exclusivity and social homogeneity fostered by the androcentrism of medieval rabbinic culture” (134). 23. Geertz, p. 29. 24. Again, I defer to an anthropological concept elaborated by Ortner, who wrote of the importance of key symbols in a given culture, some of which she calls “summarizing symbols,” that speak to a “broader context of attitude” so that “many other cultural ideas and attitudes presuppose, and make sense only in the context of, those meanings formulated by the symbol.” Ortner, esp. p. 1343a. 25. Tom Head has made the point in a particularly chastening fashion in writing of the medieval ordeal: “But the work of recent scholars of the ordeal show to bad effect the influence of Clifford Geertz’s oft-cited study of the Balinese cockfight. In making that ritual a symbolic theatre in which Balinese society itself takes center stage, Geertz made his audience lose sight of the fact that at the ritual’s heart stood a pair of crazed fowls with razor blades attached to their legs. . . . And so, mutatis mutandis, historians of the ordeal. For they have overlooked the most obvious aspect of the ordeal by fire. In the midst of its ritual theatre, bodies burned.” Head, 2000a, p. 233. 26. See, for instance, Cazelles; Coon; Newman; Mooney; Szarmach; and of course the groundbreaking studies of Bynum, beginning with Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 27. The filmmaker Spike Lee did not invent Malcolm X, nor did Oliver Stone invent JFK. The novelist Don Delillo did not fabricate Lee Harvey Oswald, etc. 28. With regard to Christian hagiography, Lifshitz has expressed much the same view. See her “Beyond Positivism and Genre: The ‘Hagiographical’ Text As a Historical Narrative.” 29. See Fleischer, 1994, pp. 267–316, who attacked the controversial article of Israel Yuval. 30. See, for instance, Mark Cohen, pp. 3–4. 31. Most recently by Rubin, in her Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews.

ONE FAITH AND FURY: MEDIEVAL JEWISH MARTYROLOGICAL POETRY AND RESISTANCE TO CONVERSION

T

HE MEDIEVAL literature of Jewish martyrdom was born not long after the First Crusade attacks on Jewish communities along the Rhine—that is, not long after the deaths of the men, women, and children who became the subjects of its chronicles, lists, and laments. Jewish perspectives on their charged encounters with the crusaders and their local allies understandably differed from their attackers’. Indeed, the need to make sense of the tragic violence that befell Jewish communities in the spring of 1096 found form in a variety of commemorative genres, from chronicles and lists to laments. Three Hebrew prose chronicles, all of which depict the violence of 1096, are the examples of this literature most familiar to modern readers.1 Still, prose was not the commemorative genre favored by medieval Jews in the Rhineland and northern France, who throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries preferred to enshrine their martyrs in verse. This book treats the poetry of martyrdom, which (unlike prose) was produced continuously over this period; for reasons I shall explain below, I concentrate especially on examples of this poetry written in northern France. By the time of the Second Crusade (1144–47), which unleashed antiJewish violence in northern France as well as in Germany, Jewish writers could avail themselves of an established set of martyrological conventions, some new and some adapted from rabbinic sources. Both the prose chronicles and the poetic laments described the martyrs in the language of cultic sacrifice, drawing on images of pollution and purity. The righteous martyrs are unblemished and ritual offerings to God, whose purity may be juxtaposed to the abhorrent “idolatry” attached to Christian worship and symbols. Jesus, too, is described in terms that inspire revulsion and suggest cultic taboo. The false salvation offered by the Christian foe is repudiated with symmetrical images and counterimages of darkness and light, or the fires of damnation and divine truth. Rather than commit apostasy, the martyrs demonstrate in a monolithic response their devotion to God’s unity. Refusing to save their lives by converting, men, women, and children, young and old, scholars and simple folk, unani-

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mously and defiantly “sanctify [God’s] Name” in suicide or submission to the enemy’s sword. The demographic diversity of the holy martyrs is as central to the representation of martyrdom as is the emphasis on communal consensus. Following the Second Crusade, the literature expands its domain to commemorate a new kind of martyr, the victim of judicial violence. And beginning with the commemorative laments for the martyrs of Blois, executed in 1171, we can see the poetry begin to change. The northern French poets, and their German students, abandon the earlier emphasis on demographic diversity to focus on an elite corps of scholar-martyrs, and they introduce new motifs for the representation of martyrdom, some of which we shall explore. The ideal of martyrdom was only one element in the complex literary and cultural weave of medieval Jewish life in northern Europe, and it mingled with many others. On the one hand, the flourishing new schools of Jewish thought and literature, chiefly the French Tosafists and their rivals in the German Pietist schools, reflect the cultural vitality that characterized the so-called twelfth-century renaissance and its aftermath. The religious and financial dealings of the scholar-rabbis brought them into frequent contact with the Christian world, as these dealings kept them in touch with cultural developments among their Jewish brethren in Spain. The heroic martyr of the literature reflects the acculturation of his authors and, for instance, their absorption of courtly ideals of valor and nobility. This reflection is particularly vivid in the martyrological literature of the northern French Jews and their Rhenish students; my sense is that the literature from Ashkenaz demonstrates less than total conformity to the Tosafist conventions, unsurprising in a region where Tosafist ideology was less than monolithic. Even as the poet-rabbis acknowledged the depth of their immersion in the intellectual and cultural environment of Christian Europe, they engaged the martyrological ideal to confront the realities of escalating harassment, persecution, and conversion. Conversion especially was a growing concern and reality, although the poetry (more than the prose) rigorously suppresses any evidence that this last option was exercised. This chapter lays the groundwork for a claim that such suppression was rooted less in denial than in an effort to stem defection. Throughout this book, I argue that as a genre, martyrological poetry in northern France evolved as a tool of resistance to the growing pressures to convert, and that the keys to understanding this role of the poetry lie both in the poems themselves and in the ways they change over time. This first chapter makes three general points about Jewish martyrological poetry from medieval northern Europe, and particularly from northern France. First, I assume that this poetry is not just about martyrdom. While martyrological laments were commemorative and therapeutic, as a

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genre they also served other ends; by the mid–twelfth century, this poetry constituted a form of cultural resistance, specifically to the pressures on French Jews to convert. Second, this poetry served a diverse audience. As texts, the poems appealed especially to the textually skilled, the young men who studied or had studied in the Tosafist schools of northern France. As performed, the poetic compositions conveyed meaning to a wider audience also, one less adept in wordplay but sensitive to extratextual effects (music, gesture, ritual, liturgical context). Thus, the poetry was directed to diverse listeners who did not necessarily hear the same way or respond to the same elements of the laments. Third and finally, the conventions of the poetry reflect its anticonversionary and polemical uses. This means that martyrological conventions changed over time, as conversion to Christianity increased and then waned, and as cultural tastes changed. The Jewish minority of northern Europe, and its literary activity, took part in wider cultural trends, some associated with persecution and others with benign, even benevolent developments in Christian society.2 Jewish martyrological literature drew also on earlier Jewish traditions, adapting and extending them in the light of medieval attitudes, tastes, and concerns. Surprisingly, scholars have treated martyrological poetry as a static genre. This attitude owes much to Western attitudes toward lyric, which has been considered a repository for “timeless,” “universal” themes. It is also indebted to a reading of Jewish history as a response to cyclic outbreaks of persecution in the Christian world—the so-called lachrymose theory of Jewish history popularized by Graetz in the late nineteenth century and boosted by events in the twentieth. Yet, as these studies demonstrate, lyric is hardly exempt from the questions we pose of other forms of cultural production. The social importance of this poetry lay in part in its ability to respond to real and perceived changes in the conditions of Jewish life. The literary conventions that characterize this poetry are not static but dynamic, and change as these conditions changed. Let me illustrate these points by tracing the use of two distinct sets of motifs in our corpus. Together, these motifs demonstrate that this poetry offered a polemical response to historical conditions even as it served penitential and commemorative ends. First, a set of motifs describing the execution of the martyrs evolved over the twelfth through thirteenth centuries to reflect the poets’ concern with communal morale and attitudes toward religious authority. This process corresponds to a trend of increased conversion that peaks in the middle to late middle decades of the thirteenth century. One motif in particular, apparently specific to poetry of Tosafist origin, suggests an acute awareness of this problem; the Tosafist laments frequently compress allusions to prophetic or divine revelation into the idealized figure of a scholar-martyr. Over time, and coinciding

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with diminishing Tosafist hegemony, these images retreat to representations of the martyr’s death as a moment of personal redemption and transfiguration. In contrast, a set of cruder images, drawing on deeprooted taboos and often framed as a dialogue between the martyr and his foe, denigrates the sacred symbols of Christianity. This second set of motifs is found throughout the martyrological poetry from northern France and Ashkenaz. The use of both motival conventions in the Tosafist laments creates a startling combination of nuanced polemic and vulgarity, suggesting that the rabbis deemed intellectual argument insufficient on its own. Where subtle reasoning might fail, then, they sought to inculcate visceral revulsion for the sacred rites and symbols of Christianity. The Jewish martyrological literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries stresses Jewish solidarity and cohesion, expressed eloquently in the images of individuals and communities who die rather than forfeit their faith. Although the poetic model refers to a real phenomenon, it represents an ideal—an ideal that stood at one end of a spectrum of possible responses to terror and despair. Indeed, the prose chronicles of 1096 violence go to great lengths to portray scenes of heroic self-sacrifice alongside the hysteria of frightened and trapped communities and the hesitation of parents and children. Bravery characterizes both those who submit to forced baptism and then revert, and those who commit suicide or slaughter others to prevent themselves or loved ones from converting. In contrast, the poetry typically praises the martyrs while expending few words on the converts who failed to emulate them. The poetic representations of 1096 violence established the convention of the victims’ uniform defiance. Repeatedly, the willingness of the martyrs to die is pronounced “by all together” (kullam beyaខhad), “with one mind” (literally, “heart”—belev eខhad). In one lament by R. Qalonymos bar Judah, the poet emphasizes (perhaps overemphasizes) the connection with adumbrations of the root yaខhad (united): Ne’esfu yaខhad nafsham hishlimu bemora ‘al yiខhud shem ha-miyuខhad yiខhadu vigvurah They were annihilated in unity, they fulfilled their lives in dread; For the Unification of the Unique Name they were united in courage.3 This motif serves two ends, juxtaposing the “One God” of the Jews to the trinitarian alternative, while representing uniform Jewish defiance to the Christians’ desire to “make us one people” (that is, a Christian nation).4 The martyrs are depicted, like the legendary R. Akiba, dying with the words of the Shema’ on their lips—a declaration of divine unity. By

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the time Hillel of Bonn composes his lament for the martyrs of Blois, he can also link the language of unified desire to that of corporate obedience: When they heard this thing they agreed in unity, To respond as one, as [they did] at Sinai: “we shall hear and obey.”5 The Jewish cohesion stressed in the poetry is a convention, a literary ideal whose distance from reality increased over the thirteenth century in tandem with the rise in conversions and the escalation of social, economic, and religious measures designed to achieve them. Christian as well as Jewish sources (chronicles, homiletical and ethical literature, Jewish legal responsa, and Christian ecclesiastical decrees) reveal the fissures in Jewish society over this period. The need for Jewish communities to cope with significant numbers of converts who had left Judaism and then desired to return is attested by the poetry also, as if under the very pressure of reality the literary ideal sometimes cracked. The atypical mention of converts (“captives”) in a set of Hebrew poems for the martyrs of Frankfurt, in the late spring of 1241, illustrates this “crack” in the literary convention of uniform resistance.6 In Jewish communities under increasing pressure, poetry thus offered a medium for interpreting persecution while striving to shape the behavior of the persecuted under stress.7 By the mid–thirteenth century, internal Jewish controversies over the status of relapsed Jews were acute. As the poetry largely suppresses this reality, exceptions like the Frankfurt laments reveal something of the dissension and lack of consensus that characterized this debate; the Frankfurt poems, moreover, take a stand on the side of the forcibly baptized. In chapter 4, we examine another example of a breach of convention that acknowledges the prevalence of conversion and the valor of converts who sought to return to Judaism, in death if not in life; this example also dates from the later thirteenth century.8 The unusual lament for Samson of Metz does not imply that Jewish policy toward forced converts had grown more liberal since 1096; insofar as one may generalize, this does not seem to have been the case. Rather, the pervasive phenomenon of relapsed Jews, many of whom were driven to convert by desperation and destitution and not the actual threat of violence, created a complicated reality and occasionally official compassion. The texts surveyed for this chapter span the period following the First Crusade through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period ending with the Rindfleisch massacres in Germany (1298) and Philip IV’s expulsion of the French Jews (1306). I have drawn on a sample of over seventy poems from northern France, England, and Germany. The poetic corpus survives as several hundred liturgical laments and penitential hymns scat-

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tered through medieval prayerbooks and liturgical miscellanies. Many are still in manuscript, although a good representation found their way into nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthologies.9 With one exception, an Old French lament for the martyrs of Troyes (1288), all of the poems are in Hebrew.10 Many of the poems respond to incidents of judicial execution following libel accusations; some describe mob violence that erupted with the onset of the crusades. Inevitably, the published corpus reflects Enlightenment and mid–twentieth century preoccupations with the place of persecution in the formation of modern Jewish identity. The chief publication dates of these works cluster in the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1930s– 1940s. Newer collections of medieval liturgical verse (such as Goldschmidt and Fraenkel’s edition of penitential hymns) redress this emphasis. So, too, the manuscripts, many of them miscellanies that mix martyrological and penitential texts with grammatical, liturgical, poetic, and legal matter, confirm the fullness of experience lived by medieval Jews even in the shadow of persecution. Even so, the figure of the martyr remains a key symbol in medieval Jewish identity, one that made sense of a difficult reality by mediating the distance between traditional beliefs and contemporary events.11 As noted, in contrast to the four prose chronicles of persecution to survive the medieval period, martyrological poetry has received little attention from modern scholars. Medieval Hebrew poetry from Ashkenaz and northern France has rarely been deemed “good” poetry by readers attuned to the elegance of the medieval Hebrew poetry written in Islamic settings, especially the “Golden Age” (eleventh-century) verse from Spain. Its dense, allusive style has daunted students of poetry as much as its disinterest in chronological narrative has deterred historians. Yet these aesthetic and historical judgments have been hasty, as this poetry yields a wealth of beauty and information about the historical conditions in which it arose and flourished. Scholars have noted that the medieval literature of martyrdom drew on select tales and motifs found in rabbinic literature, particularly concerning the Hadrianic persecutions of the second century.12 However, the medieval chronicles and verses reinvigorate these ancient motifs, which had lain dormant for centuries, in ways that suggest contemporary as well as diachronic influences.13 Accordingly, recent scholarship on the Jews of medieval France and Ashkenaz has emphasized the degree to which these Jews were part of a larger world.14 Nonetheless, from the early twelfth century, the Hebrew poets had particularly Jewish questions to answer. The Hebrew poems of martyrdom served a range of therapeutic and theological needs. Stylized and difficult, many were included in the penitential and fast day liturgies that blossomed during this period. In digni-

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fied, formal cadences, they ushered into the glory of eternal sainthood the innocent victims of mob and judicial violence. Most of these men and women had suffered degradation, torture, and mutilation while living, and incineration or exposure after death. Some had defied their oppressors, while others had fled, confessed under torture or implicated their neighbors, families, and friends. Yet, rarely does the poetry permit us a glimpse of frailty or doubt.15 Whatever their human flaws, the martyrs were memorialized as models of purity unsullied in devotion to their God. The poetry honored their resistance to defilement in images of ritual purity, while it anchored the scene of their deaths in the language of covenantal renewal. Poetic descriptions of the holy martyrs burning at the stake drew frequently on traditional sources to reassure listeners that their historical circumstances were not a sign they had been abandoned by God. In doing so, they diverged significantly from the conventions established in earlier laments for the victims of First and Second Crusade violence. Ambitiously, the poets “converted” images of debasement and suffering into affirmations of God’s presence: Burning men appear in the trappings of Sinai, and victims broken on the wheel in the visionary language of Ezekiel. The later poems, responding to incidents in the second half of the thirteenth century, emphasize the martyr as an image of personal transfiguration, whose sufferings illumine the hand of an omnipresent God. The fall from this linguistic register to the vulgar epithets hurled by the martyrs at their Christian foes is illustrated in a second set of motifs, which are central to the representation of religious coercion and resistance in the poems. The first set of images offered theological reassurance to the witnesses and survivors of Christian violence. In contrast, the second set of images, often staged as a confrontation between the oppressor and his victims, tapped cultural taboos and fears of pollution. The undefiled Jew spurns the contaminating waters of baptism (or the necrophilia of Christianity itself).16 When both sets of motifs are found in the poetry, as is often the case in laments of Tosafist origin, they suggest a conscious strategy to foster intellectual contempt and visceral antipathy for Christianity. Traditionally, readers of this poetry have assumed that the rabbi-poets intended the figure of the martyr for direct emulation, as a means of preparing their audiences for martyrdom. There is evidence that under attack, a certain percentage of Jews took this formula for resistance seriously; representations of parents slaying their children or of other forms of suicide-martyrdom were not literary fabrications. But there is equally evidence that advocating suicide or slaughter was a policy that troubled the rabbis, as well it might. For the rabbis (and hence for the literature), to have endorsed martyrdom as the solution to conversionary pressure

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would have been inconsistent with the ongoing, deliberative steps both advocated for the survival of the living. In other words, Jewish martyrological poetry is not just a literal endorsement of “voluntary martyrdom.”17 This is a way of restating that the poetry of martyrdom is about more than martyrs; its idealized depictions of martyrdom communicate a surplus of meaning above and beyond the advocacy of defiance unto death.18 An example from our own time may be helpful. The image of “the Israeli” among American Jews from the late 1960s through the early 1980s advertised another kind of idealized Jew, one liberated from the complex loyalties, dependencies, and frailties of diaspora life. “The Israeli,” however, did not represent the literal desire that all diaspora Jews should become Israelis, a desire that would have entailed the annihilation of the diaspora setting on which not only the symbol but the actual Israeli depended for life. Rather, “the Israeli” as an ideal offered a reading of the conditions of Jewish life in the diaspora, its historical anxieties and sometimes its self-loathing, its fear of weakness and dependency. That is why, as an ideal, the image of the Israeli Jew continues to reinforce American Jewish identity among American Jews who have no intention of migrating to Israel, and even as that image has been tarnished by the realities of statehood and civil discord. So, too, the image of the martyr was not intended as a prescription for the annihilation of Jewish communities, but as an ideal that encapsulated the conflicts of Jewish identity under stress and offered a symbolic mediation of their contradictions. Recently, in fact, literalist readings of medieval Jewish martyrological writing have yielded to more complex views. Jeremy Cohen has suggested that the 1096 chronicles were directed to forced converts, the men (and indirectly, the women) who by accepting baptism had survived to tell the story of their communities’ destruction. For this audience, biblical and rabbinic allusions in the texts undermined the surface reading of martyrdom as an ideal.19 Alternatively, Abraham Grossman has suggested that the martyrological poetry reflects a rabbinic perception of Jewish uncertainty; the “ideal of qiddush haShem [martyrdom] was offered as a defense against persecution and the dangers of conversion.”20 Certainly, reverence for the heroic martyrs commemorated in the literature and in a variety of ritual acts privileged the identity of the persecuted, who endured God’s chastisement with a renewed sense of their own election. In my own reading, the rabbis’ concern was less with what Grossman calls “the simple folk” and more with the potential for defection among their own ranks.21 Not all Jewish converts to Christianity converted at the point of the sword. In real life, people did weaken before the enemy, sometimes in terror, sometimes in cunning, and sometimes in despair.

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The poems that respond to judicial executions are of particular interest in this regard, as they reflect some of the effects of conversionary pressure manifested outside the violence described in the poem, in policy rather than physical attacks. Indeed, the containment of anti-Jewish violence in legal procedure and ritual suggests the presence of other forms of pressure beyond the site of the stake. A recent study suggesting that medieval adolescent males were at high risk for conversionary efforts may help to explain some of the new martyrological conventions that emerge in laments commemorating incidents of judicial violence.22 William C. Jordan has argued that the majority of medieval Jewish converts to Christianity were male, and that “the evidence is reasonably strong that these males were youthful at the time of conversion.”23 Raised in an environment characterized by “tremendous pressures . . . to submit to community and parental authority,” young men experiencing the characteristic frustration and volatility of adolescence could see in conversion a powerful way to rebel. So, too, the sight of parental humiliation and financial distress could fuse in young men’s minds the desire to escape instability and indignity with the conviction that the degraded status of the Jew was a sign of God’s displeasure.24 As Jordan and other scholars have noted, conversion could also provide an outlet for frustrations experienced within the home, in conflicts between fathers and children, or between husbands and wives. These pressures, too, bore down on Jewish communities.25 Thus, for instance, the trend among northern European Jewish families to betroth their children even prior to the traditional age of twelve or thirteen must have brought psychological and emotional strain to young couples, as well as to relations between couples and supervisory parents. Child marriages also meant that adolescent rebellion that took the form of conversion was more likely to rend a marital arrangement than in times and places where marriages were contracted later. Indeed, the anecdotal references to voluntary converts often feature a young man as protagonist.26 The literary exempla are also suggestive in this context, as for instance the tale of the “lad” whose father must restrain him in a cellar until his desire to convert, enacted “with great impertinence and . . . many strange words,” had passed.27 The legal literature also testifies to medieval awareness of youth as a precarious station in Jewish identity. The story of young Yom Tov, the son of Moses of London, a great and wealthy scholar of thirteenth-century England, describes a popular young student who commits suicide rather than yield to a “demon” entreating him to convert. Here is a story about the recuperative status of martyrdom, as well as the ways it might be invoked to preserve traditional institutions of authority.28 The Jewish elite is again notable for defection in the thirteenth-century treatise of Meir of Narbonne, in

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which the archbishop (Guy Foulquois) taunts Meir for refusing to admit the truth of Christianity by converting “as do the rest of your intelligentsia.”29 Similarly, the whimsical catalogue of the advantages of conversion compiled around 1270 by the convert known as Andreas dwells on the temptations of food, drink, and women, another suggestion that a younger audience is in mind.30 Erosion from these ranks was a serious problem, as illustrated in the case of Nicholas Donin, the former Jew who launched the ecclesiastical attack on the Talmud in 1240. Donin himself was an adolescent convert, as the Jewish account of the Talmud trial of 1240 mentions that R. Yehiel excommunicated him some dozen years earlier.31 The case of Herman the Jew, who left an autobiographical account of his (adolescent) conversion, has been well treated.32 The defection of the male elite also diminished a class of leaders and undermined the shaky morale of communities under stress. The poetry responds to this problem, as we shall see by examining the ways in which it represents judicial execution in the language of revelation, and Christianity in the language of cultic taboo. The Hebrew poetry commemorating the victims of First Crusade violence suggests the magnitude of the trauma to survivors. The prose chronicles allude to the weariness of embattled and frightened Jews who are told by Christian protectors that their troubles are a sign of God’s desertion.33 In response, the prose and verse authors invoke cultic metaphors: The valorous Jewish men and women who slaughter their families and themselves are like priests engaged in the sacred rites of cultic sacrifice. Accordingly, the threat posed by Christianity is one of cultic impurity as well as physical annihilation.34 Movingly, the First Crusade poetry turns to God, sometimes in fear and sometimes in fury, with accusations of passivity and betrayal. “Where are Your mighty zeal and power? / Where are Your wonders and signs of old?”35 The Christian foe in the poems is quick to capitalize on the hand dealt him by history. As he gloats over his victims, he utters words that must have echoed in their hearts: You abandoned ones, why hope for relief and healing [cf. Jer.33:6]? Your King has abandoned you to be devoured by the nations. Do this and live: worship the image. Remember this: the Lord rebukes His enemies [Ps. 74:18].36 Resolutely, the Jew responds. The martyrological poems stage dialogues between Jew and Christian, counterpointed by feverish interrogations of God. The anguished accusations offer legitimacy to a potentially mutinous expression of grief. At the same time, the community’s willingness to submit to its destiny—even one that demands their destruction—

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is reinforced by the language of sacrificial offering. Collective obedience to an inscrutable fate echoes throughout the first generation of laments: Together, whole-heartedly, the remnant was willing. They went to their Maker, they fulfilled their worship energetically. Their lips moved as they reconciled their souls with vigor: There is a God who rules on Earth [Ps. 58:12 ⳱ 58:11 RSV]37 They rejoice to utter “Hear O Israel” as they call out. Their mouths groan with the benediction for their offering. Together fathers and sons, bridegrooms and their brides Hasten to the slaughter as if to their wedding chamber.38 As already indicated, the insistence on the unanimous and unified willingness of a diverse Jewish population to accept death over baptism is a standard feature of laments commemorating First and Second Crusade violence. The poems emphasize the holiness of entire communities that offered themselves wholeheartedly and even joyously to God. Men, women, and children “stretch out their necks” like lambs (or doves) to be killed, and the blood of the martyrs, distinguished in life by gender, age, rank, and learning, mingles in death. The poems celebrate the courage of the victims, who are compared to sacrificial offerings, and call for God’s vengeance and pity. As Israel Yuval has noted, the frequent recourse to the motif of God’s bloody coat has its origins in rabbinic tradition and is intimately connected to a theology of vengeance.39 Vengeance, of course, requires that God be roused from his inexplicable silence, and thus the poems plead also that the innocent martyrs may intercede with Heaven on their behalf. By the second half of the twelfth century, the willingness of secular authorities to prosecute their Jews presented the poets with a new and terrifying image of defeat. True, the martyr burning at the stake, or crushed and impaled on the wheel, was a visible demonstration of Christianity’s failure to convert the Jews. But the innocent man or woman whose life ended in such degradation and pain posed the question of God’s absence with excruciating urgency. Beginning with the laments for the martyrs of Blois (1171), a new set of motifs emerges. Collective obedience yields to collective witness, as the Blois laments depict God speaking through the blazing martyrs in a reenactment of his appearance at Sinai. Later, this motif evolves yet again, so that the images of martyrs broken on the wheel evoke the visions of Ezekiel, or the wheels of Pharaoh’s chariots overturning in the sea. God’s appearance at Sinai is to all the Israelites, whereas his appearance to Ezekiel is to Ezekiel alone. The wheel laments, almost all of which date from the thirteenth century, constitute a retreat from the grand ges-

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ture to theophany heralded at Blois. Martyrs of the stake are also described in images of more intimate revelation. The preference for individual vignettes, and a wider range of martyr types, permit a glimpse of a new, more personal model of martyrdom. It is a model in keeping with literary and cultural trends in the Christian world, as well as an echo of the disintegration of centralized rabbinic authority. The Blois incident marked the first time in medieval Jewish memory that a secular ruler responsible for their welfare had prosecuted and condemned his Jews, and it is no wonder that the Jewish sources reflect a sense of new crisis and dismay.40 The catalyst was the claim of a Christian servant that he had seen a Jew cast the corpse of a Christian child into the Loire River. Long-simmering resentments between a local Blois lord and a prominent Jewish woman named Pucellina (to whom we return in chapter 2) escalated tensions and resulted in the mass arrest of the Blois Jewish community, totaling some forty adult men and women. Ransom negotiations broke down and on May 26, 1171, thirty-two Jews were burned at the stake.41 Although a majority (seventeen or eighteen) of the Blois victims were women, the men included scholars of renown associated with the northern French Tosafist schools.42 So, too, were the poets who commemorated them. These poets introduced new martyrological conventions, recasting the ideal martyr as a member of the scholar elite and fusing the descriptions of scholar-martyrs with images of biblical revelation. Hillel of Bonn first links the Blois martyrs to the story of Sinai, when God spoke from the fire to the assembled Israelites and gave them his Law. In Hillel’s lament, the Sinai motif signals collective witness and obedience and is distinct from the motif of the martyrs’ incombustibility, which appears a few stanzas later (and which will receive a detailed treatment in chapter 2): When they heard this, they unanimously reconciled themselves To saying as one, “We will obey and hearken,” as at Sinai. They are all one man’s children, a perfect family. They would not deny God. Hear O Israel, the Lord Your God Is One [Deut. 6:4].43 (vv. 13–16) When the fire reached the bonds of the kohanim’s hands The ties were severed from these men’s hands. They cried out: “The fire has tested us and we are innocent!” The kings and princes of the earth were unmoved! [Ps. 2:2]44 (vv. 40–44) Gershom bar Isaac develops this iconography in his pair of Blois laments.45 In “Ish levush ha-badim” (The Man Clothed in Linen), the fire

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scene evolves: The martyrs, Gershom claims, should have been incombustible, like Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the fiery furnace. Nonetheless, their immunity was voided so they might atone in death for the sins of the community.46 The second poem, “Ge’al lekha atah ge’ulati” (Redeem Me Yourself), is built around a central scene in which the men, burning but still alive, speak from the blaze in the language of Sinai: Redeem me Yourself from the evil ones, Lifting up in consolation the reviled, the flagellated and burned, They who mention Your Holy Name and delight in Your faith: From the midst of the fire, you hear the sound of speech. [Deut. 4:6] (vv. 1–4) Gershom later reinforces the association of the martyrs with Sinai: You, O Lord, can have compassion when I feel slaughtered in my bones By the ones who say, “Where is your God?” while striking my cheek. I hoped for protection, O Living God, my Promise! He spoke from the fire like us and lived [Deut. 5:23] (vv. 45–48) The Blois poets were all Tosafists, members of a cadre of scholars who reinterpreted rabbinic law for the Jewish world of their times. If the ideal martyr in their poetry emerged as a figure very much in their own image, that should be no surprise. The rabbi-poets reinforced an image of religious authority—the close-knit network of Tosafist authority—as well as a martyrological ideal. How could they better represent their conviction in their own righteousness than by portraying the holy martyrs as men like themselves, and thus implicitly portraying men like themselves as holy? When Count Thibaut burned his Jews in Blois, the Tosafist schools were at their peak. Their reach extended into Germany and England, where the leading scholars were often men who had studied in French Tosafist schools, or whose teachers had done so. In Germany, certainly the Tosafists had their rivals, and Ephraim Kanarfogel has shown recently to what extent Pietist beliefs and methods could infiltrate the Tosafist ranks.47 Nonetheless, a series of anti-Jewish attacks in the next few decades permits us a glimpse of how quickly writers exposed to Tosafist influence adopted their poetic innovations. Scholars have long noted, for instance, that one of the prominent martyrs who died at York in 1190 was the Tosafist poet, exegete, and scholar, Rabbi Yom Tov of Joigny. Indeed, according to several accounts, it was Yom Tov who exhorted his fellow Jews in York tower to commend themselves to God rather than die in enemy hands. Scholars have paid less attention, however, to the two laments written for the York martyrs. One is by Joseph b. Asher of Chartres, a young Tosafist poet, and the other by Menahem b. Jacob of

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Worms, an older scholar educated both by Rhenish Tosafist teachers and their more conservative rivals in Worms.48 Joseph of Chartres’s lament for the York martyrs demonstrates his familiarity with the Blois motifs. He singles out four martyrs (of some 150) by name, two of whom are scholars and two men of wealth. In general, the martyrs are eulogized for righteousness and learning. Yom Tov himself Joseph compares to Mt. Sinai, and he proclaims that the great scholar’s body remained incorrupt in death: [Like] Sinai, he uprooted mountains and made the crooked straight. His oral and written teachings were infallible. May he rest secure. His flesh will not decompose. How goodly are your tents, O Jacob [Nu. 24:5]! (vv. 57–60) Menahem’s lament also shows signs that he is familiar with the new conventions, but he inserts them more subtly, perhaps cautiously. Adhering to the norms of crusade laments, he does not list any martyrs by name, but shapes them as a collective entity. The lament calls upon many familiar motifs, describing the martyrs as cultic offerings who offer atonement to the living community for ancient sins, and stressing the willingness of entire families to die for God. “Allelei li ki va’u” is a composite lament, treating two episodes of anti-Jewish violence sequentially; the first twothirds of the poem refer to a riot that resulted in Jewish deaths, many by drowning, in Boppard in 1179, and the last third is devoted to York. Strikingly, the allusions in the respective segments of the poem allow us to hear the echoes of biblical history, moving from the parting of the Red Sea (the drownings at Boppard) to the fires of Sinai (the burning of York tower). This pattern also characterizes the Blois lament of Joseph (Bekhor Shor) of Orl´eans, which we shall discuss in the next chapter. Menahem, too, refers to images of incorruptibility, here in a double reference to Daniel’s companions in the fiery furnace and Aaron’s sons incinerated in the Tabernacle: Long ago, You smelled the scent of the three faithful ones, These zealous ones fell into the fiery furnace for You. Now recall how many of my children— And the fire with which God burned [them] [Lev. 10:6]. (vv. 73–76) None of these topoi is found in the 1096 or 1147 laments. Nor do they feature in contemporary laments written by scholars removed from Tosafist influence, such as the laments written for martyrs in Speyer and Boppard after violence in those cities broke out in 1196–97, in connection with Henry VI’s preparations for a new crusade.49 The York laments thus

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testify to the rapidity with which Tosafist motifs and concerns were taking hold in commemorative verse composed in their orbit. By the early thirteenth century, the Tosafist network was showing signs of strain; by midcentury it was splintered. The shock dealt by incidents like Blois was unlike the shock of the Crusades, which wrought spontaneous, uncontrolled, and discrete acts of violence. Subsequent incidents of judicial intimidation and violence made Blois in retrospect an augur of the rain of blows to come. Significantly, the charred promise of Sinai resurfaces in Meir of Rothenburg’s moving lament for the burning of the Talmud in 1242: Did my Rock [appear] in flame and fire to give you Later to another fire to blaze at your hems? O Sinai, was this why the Lord chose you, disdaining Greater mountains to shine within your borders? To be a sign of the Law when Her glory would dwindle And go down?50 In descriptions of human martyrs, the promise of Sinai may have seemed brazen to invoke as times grew harder. Later poets developed the traditional quatrain form favored in martyrological laments to craft tiny vignettes of bravery in which individual martyrs proclaimed their faith or rushed to the fire like brides and grooms to their wedding chamber. Hillel of Bonn’s lament for Blois had also tapped this imagery, which proved more enduring than Sinai’s message of corporate obedience and revelation.51 The poets continued to use cultic imagery to describe the death of the martyrs as expiation for communal sins. Sometimes they alluded (especially if sacred books were also burned) to the rabbinic legend of Hananiah b. Teradion, a second-century martyr who was burned wrapped in a scroll of the Law. The martyrs die to atone for their communities, and the mourners pray for redemption and revenge. Overall, the fire remains the place where the martyr meets his or her God, but it is more and more an intimate meeting. Later generations of poets continued to insert God into their verses when he seemed most absent in the world, as can also be seen in descriptions of executions on the wheel. Breaking on the wheel was chiefly a German method of execution, although, with mechanical variation, it is found also in French lands. It is reserved for the execution of males.52 Ephraim of Bonn’s late twelfth-century chronicle, the Sefer Zekhirah (Book of Remembrance), describes the male victims of a riot in Neuss (1186) broken and displayed on wheels.53 Eight laments of my seventy-two-poem sample referred to the wheel; with one Second Crusade exception, they commemorate incidents ranging from 1235–83.

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The Hebrew Bible uses three words that correspond to the English “wheel” (ofan, galgal, and ma’agal), and they appear in several dozen biblical passages. The poets’ preference, however, is to draw on Ezekiel (chiefly chapters 1 and 10). Of my eight wheel poems, three also cite Exodus 14:25.54 In Ezekiel’s vision of the flaming wheel, the rabbi-poets exploited, as they did with the fireproof imagery, imagery that once again “converts” the scene of God’s absence and passivity into one of divine presence and revelation. However, unlike God’s appearance at Sinai, his appearance to Ezekiel was personal, merited by the prophet alone. Accordingly, these later poems signal a more intimate revelation; the mangled bodies of the victims mark a moment of personal transcendence not necessarily shared by the onlookers. In contrast, Exod. 14:25, preceded by God’s appearance in a column of smoke and fire to rout the Egyptian camp, offers public theophany with a vengeance. God overturns the chariots of Israel’s oppressors and they drown in the Red Sea. The three poems that allude to this scene may illustrate a local convention; two of the poems are for the martyrs of Lauda (Lauda-K¨onigshofen) (1235) and one is for the martyrs of Fulda killed in the same year. In both cases, the spectacular brutality of the executions may have turned the poets to the imagery of anticipated vengeance and reversal in the Exodus passage. For the onlookers and mourners of the martyrs broken, dismembered, and displayed, the language of the poets offered transfiguration and consolation. Israel was not abandoned, but partner to a renewed and bloody rebirth of its covenant with God. Thus Joel bar Isaac haLevi describes the martyrs of Cologne in 1146, whom the Christians (Crusaders?) “wanted to pollute with their stinking, cursed waters” (v. 9) with an explicit citation from Ezek. 33:22 and allusions to Ezek. 39:12 and 1:20–21. Yo’etz bar Malkiel, less characteristically, takes his wheels from Ezek.1:20–21 but mourns his seven Alsacian martyrs (1270, Weissenburg) with verses from Mal. 3:14 and 3:19, in which God rebukes an ever wayward Israel for turning away from him. Isaac bar Nathan’s portrait of the martyrs of Lauda (1235) draws both on Ezekiel and Exodus. The martyrs are “cherubs,” the great angels of Ezekiel’s vision (and who guard the wilderness Ark in Exod. 25 and 37). They approach the wheels of torture as immortal creatures of grace approach the throne of God. A lament for a martyr burned in Metz in 1276 also mentions the wheel. This poem, preserved in a single copy in a rare illuminated prayerbook, was composed and inserted by the codex’s northern French scribe.55 The second stanza reads: Those who draw forth iniquity and who backslide to falsehood, the nation that speaks lies,

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They bring wheels upon wheels within wheels and coals hot for blowing And mournfully, they utter laments and woe / The bonds of his hands dissolved like wax, / He spread his hands and wailed. The heart of the crowd went out to him / when they saw his hands and eyes yearning / to share in God’s portion. O Earth! Do not cover his blood, / May his fat and flesh and organs / go up as a savory offering. (vv. 6–10) The poet mourns his friend Samson who was broken by the wheel and burned after a mysterious ten-year reprieve from execution (v. 18). In one taut phrase, Benjamin the Scribe uses all three biblical Hebrew terms for “wheel” to emphasize the horror of Samson’s fate: ofan ve-galgal bema’agal massigim (“they bring wheels upon wheels within wheels,” v. 7). Two of the three words appear together in Ezek. 10:13 (“as for the wheels, they were called in my hearing the whirling wheels”). The second half of the verse alludes to Isa. 54:16, which assures its listeners that God has authored their destruction (“Behold, I [God] have created the smith who blows the fire of coals and produces a weapon for its purpose. I have also created the ravager to destroy.”).56 The eleventh-century northern French exegete R. Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (“Rashi,” d.1105) referred Isa. 54:16 directly to medieval reality: “I am He who prepares persecutions for him.” Other allusions in Benjamin’s poem trace a picture of treachery and deceit. Samson the martyr has been “buried” and “hidden away” for a decade (v. 18), and “sold to strangers to lighten my sin” (v. 21). While very little is known about the life of Metz Jews in this period, the meager evidence suggests a community under extreme duress.57 An anomalous phrase in this poem gives us a sense of how extreme that duress was. Verse 4 of Benjamin’s poem describes Samson as “forced” (ne’enas), which in this context most likely means “converted” (hence the anusim, or conversos, of the later, Spanish period). If, indeed, Samson was imprisoned on false charges in the late 1260s, he may well have succumbed at some point to pressure to convert. And then—otherwise he would not be a qadosh, a holy martyr—he decided to revert to the faith of his youth. Unfortunately, once baptized, Samson was subject to the laws governing relapsed heretics, condemned (if he refused to abjure his perverse beliefs) and executed. If this reading is correct, Benjamin’s poem is a unique instance of a martyrological lament written for a converted and relapsed Jew. What passionate conviction drove Benjamin to insert his poem in what may be the most ornately illuminated maខhzor (festival prayerbook) to

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survive from medieval northern Europe? One thing is clear: As far as Benjamin was concerned, death confirmed his friend Samson’s Jewishness. But conditions in 1276 were hardly what they were forty years earlier, and they were a far cry from the situation in 1171. If Joseph Shatzmiller’s cautious estimate is correct, conversion rates to Christianity had peaked in the 1250s and 1260s. At their height, they may have reached 5 to 10 percent of the total Jewish population, a crisis from a Jewish perspective, if a failure from the perspective of canons and kings.58 Some of those Jews remained Christians, and some later reverted to the faith of their birth. Benjamin’s audience surely knew such relapsed Jews, and may even have included a few. His poem implies that the situation of the reverted Jew—at least, this reverted Jew—elicited more sympathy among Jewish co-religionists than it had in the past. The depictions of death and transfiguration in the wheel laments and in some late thirteenth-century descriptions of deaths at the stake may also reflect how much Tosafist hegemony had weakened; the images of intimate revelation suggest something of the extent to which mystical and Pietist concerns had infiltrated Tosafist lands. Sympathy for a reverted Jew, however, does not imply endorsement of his or her choices. In prose and poetry, the Hebrew writers raided their textual resources for phrases and images to portray the threat of conversion. The prose sources focus on the dangers of baptism, which is a ritual pollution and humiliation accepted by Jews facing lay or crusader mobs. Submission to baptism spares the Jews’ lives, but the baptismal waters bring impurity, described as zខ aខhanah or tinnuf (“filth” or “pollution”). There was . . . a pious man named R. Isaac haLevi, whom they tortured greatly. When they saw his suffering, they polluted him against his will, for he was confused by the blows he had received. When he regained his senses, he returned within three days and went to Cologne, entered his house and waited briefly, just an hour, then went to the Rhine and drowned himself. (1096)59 Some foolish men attacked him who had been defiled by the abominable pollution, and they entreated him to pollute himself and to commit apostasy against the Living God. But he refused and held fast to his Fortress, in order to love his God and cling to Him. (1146–47)60 We pleaded in tears for our lives and for our women and children, lest the evil ones kill them and pollute them with their impure urine. . . . On Friday a young man came with me to the market to buy bread for the Sabbath, and they threw him to the ground,

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trampled him in the mud and put a knife to his heart. Then they asked him if he wished to commit apostasy against the Living God. He said, no. They continued to beat him until he fled into a house of idolatry [i.e., a church]. They ran after him, but the monks would not permit them to harm him and he left by another exit. (1187)61 The prose accounts stress identical points. In almost all the episodes, the Christian tormentors “entreat” the victims, “asking” if it is their “wish” (perhaps better translated in this context as “will”) to convert. The Jews “refuse,” “saying” they will not do so. Even the young man in the market, held at knife-point, is asked whether he wishes to convert. The point had legal significance. As we know from the rich discussion of forced conversion in the Christian literature, and cases such as the forced baptism of Benedict of York in London (1189) or Baruch the Jew (a victim of the Shepherds’ Crusade), the convert’s assent was essential.62 Beyond the realistic touches the dialogues add to the narratives, their didactic motive is clear: Just say “no.” The focus on baptism as pollution also reinforces the cultic metaphors of martyrdom; the martyrs’ refusal to be defiled underscores their acceptability as sacrificial offerings. In contrast, only six of the laments surveyed for this study referred to baptism. Thus in the poetic universe the threat of conversion assumes a different cast. When baptism is mentioned, it is in a polemical context emphasizing the impurity of Christianity. A lament from the Second Crusade begins with the poet’s anguished reproach to God. “There is none like You among the mute,” he cries, punning on a familiar biblical and liturgical line. (The pun was not original to bar Shalom, but had its origins in rabbinic tradition. It becomes a topos of the medieval laments.)63 Isaac bar Shalom builds his argument in a crescendo of tripartite lines, weaving in a refrain that pleads with God to end His silence. The poet represents the confrontation between Jew and Christian in dialogue: Soothsayers and necromancers, our enemies spoke contentiously: “How wretched are these Jews! [Neh. 3:34 ⳱ RSV 4:2]”—Do not be silent! “Come take counsel, lest you be a laughing-stock [a source] of quarrel and strife [Isa. 58:4]. “If you will become like us, and turn to the filthy Nazarene [or, offshoot—see Isa. 14:19]64 we will be one people [Gen.34:16].”—Do not be silent! The smitten ones cried out in response: “We will not turn back and we will not worship him:

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You shall utterly detest and abhor it [Deut. 7:26]. Our Redeemer lives and endures. We shall worship and pray to Him He is our salvation in times of distress [Isa. 33:2].”—Do not be silent!65 Ephraim of Regensberg, a twelfth-century poet renowned for his lyricism and argumentative personality, wrote a number of penitential hymns that refer to persecution. In “Ayumatkha kevulah ba-golah” (Your Awesome One [⳱ Israel] Is Bound in Exile), Ephraim describes enemies who “put gall in my food” (v. 12) and “make me swallow the broth of abomination” (v. 22). In other poems, the Christian’s attempts to persuade the Jew to convert meet with aggressive insults: He bows to one hanged on a hook / and counsels me to betray You. / He worships a block of wood.66 In a liturgical song destined for recitation on the last day of Passover, a time for redemptive themes, Ephraim calls for revenge against those who “have exchanged God’s glory for an image” (v. 2). He continues: They corrupt the truth, / and worship a dead man, / a [heap of] rotting bones. They seek a pretext / for the god, / then come to me with axes.67 (vv. 15–16) One final example suffices, from a long lament by Judah bar Qalonymos for the martyrs of Speyer killed in 1196. In another dialogue segment, the Christian’s request is met with a vitriolic response: He made a speech, his mouth gaping wide: / “Choose my path, and follow the the abyss, / to do his deeds—how alien are his deeds [Isa. 28:21]! “We will give you a great portion, / a gift that is genuine and precious. / And I will add to it much more [2 Sam. 12:8]. “So that you will follow the sign of my idol / and rely on a staff made of reed / gods and molten divinities [Exod. 34:17].” I answered this to my oppressors: / “who is this [in whom] you say to put my trust? / A bastard shall not enter the Lord’s congregation [Deut. 23:3]. The image of your worship is sealed in his grave! / The symbol of [your] zeal is a tattered corpse! / For a hanged man is accursed of God [Deut. 21:23]. His corpse was tied and hanged on a cross [tree]. / How can I worship what was lowered into a pit? / That is alien worship [Isa. 28:21].

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Buried and sealed with mockery and scorn, / his bones are full of rot and he was destroyed in wrath. / God forbid me from doing such a thing [Isa. 28:21]!68 The vulgarity of these polemical segments contrasts with the poignant images and speeches of the burning scholar-martyrs of Blois, or the shattered victims of the wheel. The overtones of revelation sounded by the fire and wheel scenes prove these poets were capable of sophistication and delicacy. The crude polemical exchanges are equally calculated for effect, and in the Tosafist poetry, the two sets of motifs work in concert. The stereotypical Christians in the poems pose genuine challenges to their Jewish combatants, however crudely the poet formulates their positions. Where was the Jews’ God when they needed him? And perhaps their Law had been superseded? Even as the depiction of the burning martyr offered one answer to this question, the polemical scenes appealed to a cruder need for gratification. Moreover, the poems repeatedly describe their foes “conspiring” or “taking counsel,” or “plotting” to intimidate the Jews. Surely this reflects ecclesiastical presence and pressure inside and beyond the courtroom as much as libel plots.69 The Jewish response derides Christianity as a false religion based on the worship of a hanged man, a rotting corpse, an abomination, a loathsome source of impurity or emptiness and nought.70 For this, what Jew would “exchange his Glory” or his “knowledge,” “leave the Source of Life” or forfeit the Unity of God’s Name? The conjunction of refined and vulgar elements gains interest when we consider the audience of the poems. All of these laments were composed for recitation in the synagogue. Not only are they preserved in liturgical manuscripts, but they often refer to public worship or to a synagogue setting. A number of laments or penititential hymns indicate refrains, and some recommend borrowing the tune of a preexisting hymn. In such a setting, a largely literate (male) audience would have heard these poems in different ways. For less educated men, deaf to subtle allusions, the crude language of the “dialogues” was still clear. So, too, the imagery of Sinai’s fiery revelation, fused with the speech of burning men and women, was unmistakable. Among the more educated, a core of adolescent and young adult men would have exercised their wits to complete truncated verses and identify their exegetical associations. At the same time, images of pollution and vulgar polemic, with their own range of associations (many sexual) brought their own appeal. If, in the world beyond the synagogue, intellectual arguments did not ultimately persuade young men to remain Jews, perhaps the poets hoped that visceral images of impurity would stand them in stead. In England as in northern France, the middle decades of the thirteenth

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century saw a peak in Jewish conversions to Christianity. Robert Stacey has described the destitution and desperation that drove shattered Jewish families into the arms of the church in England.71 Separate studies by Joan Greatrex and Barrie Dobson confirm his picture. Geatrex’s focus on the corodies, or charitable pensions, issued to the converts, also marked the midcentury as a “turning point” for conversion, with as many as 150 former Jews housed in the London Domus.72 Shatzmiller also relied on the evidence of the subsidies to conclude that the 1250s–1260s marked the height of a conversion “hemorrhage.”73 The picture, as the poetry confirms, is one of internal crisis and disarray in the middle decades of the thirteenth century yielding to embattled defiance in the later period. “Heightened concern” for Jewish conversion in the 1280s, just prior to the English expulsion, does not imply renewed efforts to compel conversion. Rather, it marks an official acknowledgment of failure, which was accompanied by the prosecution of relapsed converts and growing political pressures on Edward I to expel his Jews.74 In contrast, the mass conversions of Jewish communities in southern Italy toward the end of the thirteenth century are an anomaly, indicative of distinct social and economic conditions.75 For France, William Jordan has written of the “unrelieved” pressure of Capetian legislation during the midcentury period and through the 1280s that was brought to bear on royal Jews.76 Again, in the middle decades of the century, the number of converts peaks around 1260.77 By the 1270s, “impoverishment also led to internal dissent.”78 Nahon accepts reports of mass conversions in Toulouse and suggests that lodges for French converts, similar to the London Domus, may have appeared in the late thirteenth century.79 Yet episodes like the Paris host desecration libel in 1290 imply that converts were not easily won at this late date. The evidence from other quarters confirms a picture of communities in panic and disarray in midcentury. Thus, for instance, as early as 1232, the rabbis of southern France and Spain seeking supporters in their attempt to condemn or protect the writings of Maimonides are unable to locate a clear set of leaders for northern French Jewry.80 The figures for Germany are vague, but indicate the same trend.81 The tide of conversions did peak, however, and for the remainder of the century Jewish resistance steadied and held fast. Still, if the kings and churchmen were unable to predict that their efforts to convert the Jews would end in defeat, the Jews must have been equally unsure of victory. The retreat in the martyrological poetry from affirmations of covenantal renewal to individual vignettes of faith reflects this uncertainty. At the same time, the poetry sustains an undiminished fury in its representations of sacred Christian symbols and beliefs. Whether the combination succeeded in stemming the tide may be an unanswerable question. But we may ask, in conclusion, whether the poets sensed the tide had been turned.

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Two laments by an otherwise unknown poet, Jacob b. Judah of Lorraine, raise this possibility. They were written for thirteen martyrs of Troyes, burned as the result of a blood libel in the spring of 1288. One of the poems is a unique vernacular (Old French) lament; the other poem is a Hebrew translation (or vice versa).82 The format is familiar. In a series of miniature tableaux, the martyrs offer up their lives. They represent a community as well as individuals: Each martyr is depicted in an individual vignette, and midway through the poem a stanza describes them burning together. The vernacular poem in particular demonstrates that the poets, and presumably their audiences, drew from the reservoir of attitudes and values that nourished the imaginations of their Christian friends and foes. Jacob’s martyrs forfeit wealth, family, and honor—the foundations of courtly valor—for love of their God. One martyr dies confessing with a phrase taken from the Chanson de Roland, and the elder Chatelain’s wife pleads to die “com mon ami.” The younger woman, the “beautiful bride,” spurns attempts to convert her also. In French she disdains the offer of a “rich squire” as a husband.83 And if in life they flinched, the real Troyes martyrs, like their poetic incarnations, gave their lives to God. These laments, like the many hundreds before them, mingle love for God and hatred for His enemies with a singular kind of vehemence. At the same time, Jacob b. Judah, like his predecessors, was crafting an ideal. Over two centuries, that ideal was embedded in a literature of faith and fury that generations of poets hoped would carve an abyss between the Jew and the Christian world that sought to convert him. These poems remind us that medieval Jews were already a part of that world. The rest of this book traces this story of acculturation and resistance through the poetry of Jewish martyrdom. The following chapters treat individual incidents and their poems, ranging from the later twelfth through the thirteenth centuries. Each presents distinct methodological problems, both literary and historical, but overall I believe that these poems offer both beauty and a rich addition to our understanding of this period. So let us begin with the first recorded prosecution of Jews on the continent on charges that they had murdered a Christian child, charges that concluded with the burning of thirty-two Jewish men and women in Blois in the spring of 1171.84

Notes 1. All three were written within decades of the tragedies they describe. See Abulafia, 1982, pp. 221–39; also Chazan, 1987, who provides an English translation of two of the chronicles. See below for more recent issues taken up in scholarship on these texts.

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2. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. 3. Qalonymos bar Judah, “Mi yiten roshi mayim” in Habermann, 1945a, p. 67. 4. The verse is used explicitly in a Second Crusade poem by Isaac bar Shalom, “Eyn kamokha ba-ilmim,” in ibid., p. 113. 5. Hillel of Bonn, “Emunei shelumei yisrael” in ibid., p. 137, and see the discussion in the next chapter. 6. There are three extant commemorative poems for the Frankfurt martyrs: “Esa bekhi unehi” (I weep and moan), by an anonymous poet; “Eyn lanu elohim ‘od zulatekha” (We have no other God but You) by R. Samuel bar Abraham haLevi; and “Ve-etonen va-akonen” (I shall mourn and lament) by R. Judah bar Moses haKohen. All three were published by Bernfeld, vol. 1, pp. 299–301; 301– 305; and vol. 3, pp. 332–35, respectively. The translations in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. The case and legal responsa are treated by Blidstein, pp. 35–116, and especially 85–104. 7. Although this chapter treats Jewish martyrological poetry, other literary genres, such as polemical literature, ethical wills, or homiletical exempla, also reveal a concern with deepening the Jewish-Christian divide. Jewish religious ordinances (taqqanot) regulated the economic and social borders between Jews and Christians. So, too, liturgical practice—the rise of new penitential liturgies for fast days, the implementation of new fast days commemorating local martyrdoms, sumptuary restrictions following executions or pogroms—accentuated the divide between the Jew and his or her foe. Jacob Katz has described a growing preoccupation with minimizing contacts with the Christian world through the later period of our discussion. See Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 1961, and Marcus, 1986, pp. 7–26. As Robert Stacey (1992, p. 266) has commented with regard to the English Jewish communities, this was a trend ironically contradicted by the decreasing ability of battered communities to sustain self-sufficiency. 8. See chapter 4. 9. The major collections of what might be called “persecution poetry” are Bernfeld; Habermann, 1945a; Schirmann, 1939; see also Berliner. The collection of martyrological rosters published by Salfeld also includes a number of laments, and the recent edition of penitential poems by Goldschmidt and Fraenkel contains a number of newly edited hymns that refer to persecution and/or martyrdom. The poems discussed in this chapter draw on all of these sources as well as additional published and unpublished ones. 10. “Mont sont a mechief” was first published by Darmesteter in “Deux elegies du Vatican,” and then again, with emendations, in “L’Auto da f´e de Troyes.” For an English translation and discussion, see Einbinder, 1999. 11. Ortner, 1973, and the introductory and concluding sections of 1989. 12. Grossman, 1993 and 1999; Ivan Marcus, 1993; Gerson Cohen, 1953 and 1993; Shalom Spiegel, 1967. 13. See, for instance, Soloveitchik, 1987; and Shepkaru. 14. See, for instance, the collection of essays culled from a conference that took place in October 1996 and published as Jews and Christians in TwelfthCentury Europe, eds. Signer and van Engen. 15. This is one feature that distinguishes it from the early prose chronicles,

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

41

which evince interest in the depiction of moral uncertainty. One example is the story of Isaac the Parnas, whose inner recriminations are immortalized in a lengthy monologue delivered at the site of his father’s house. See the chronicle of Solomon bar Samson, in Habermann, 1945a, p. 37. 16. The contemptuous claim that Christians worshiped a corpse invokes the extensive treatment of corpses as a source of ritual uncleanness in Jewish law. 17. The term “voluntary martyrdom” was intended to describe death that was sought actively, often but not necessarily self-inflicted. Daniel Boyarin has condemned the term as useless; see his Dying for God, p. 121. 18. Claudia Tate makes a similar point about modern misreadings of the idealized domestic heroine and marriage plot in late nineteenth-century African American fiction by women. Because the “system of domestic symbols for encoding an ideology of personal and social advancement” changed radically over time, later readers did not identify the ideological meanings of earlier texts. As a result, a corpus of novels ceased to become “politically readable.” Tate, p.100. 19. Cohen’s discussion does not treat poetry. See Jeremy Cohen, 1994. 20. Grossman, 1993, p. 121. See also Grossman’s 1986 study, pp. 29–60. 21. This in part was the conclusion of a paper I presented at the Center for Jewish Studies in Philadelphia in March 1999. That paper, “The Fire Does Not Burn: Martyrological Conventions in the Blois Laments,” has been incorporated into chapter 2. 22. Jordan, 2001. I thank Professor Jordan for making a copy of this paper, delivered in October 1996, available for reading (and quotation) prior to publication of the conference volume. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. Jordan spends some time discussing the applicability of the concept of adolescence to medieval life, and the reader may follow his discussion there. The male-to-female ratio among converts is also discussed for the case of England by Barrie Dobson, 1992, pp. 145–68, and see especially pp. 165–66. Regarding the case of the fifteen London Jews (thirteen of them women) condemned as relapsed converts (i.e., relapsed to their former Jewish status), see also Logan. As Dobson notes, the case could as easily argue for the greater tenacity of women driven to convert (temporarily) by severe destitution and desperation as for the reverse. 25. Ibid.; and Shatzmiller, 1995. 26. Notice our Frankfurt example. And see, for instance, the tales preserved in Gaster and Br¨ull. On the collation and evolution of the Ma’aseh Book, many of whose stories originate in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, see Zfatman. 27. Ma’aseh Book, tale no. 176. Note also the following tale, no. 177, entitled “R. Judah Hasid Detains a Young Man until the Impulse to Become Baptized Passes.” 28. See Kupfer. Although it is not impossible that he existed, the extant records do not document a son named Yom Tov for Moses of London; see Stokes; and Roth. Ephraim Kanarfogel observes that the son may have existed even so (personal communication, July 2000). In either case, the story reads like a didactic exemplum. 29. Chazan, 1973c, pp. 587–94, and for this specific citation, p. 593.

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30. Neubauer, 1884–85. See Shatzmiller’s brief discussion of this text, 1995, p. 310. Significantly, Christian exempla that include the conversion of a Jew often describe the successful convert as a young boy. A popular example was the tale of the Jewish glassblower who threw his son into the oven after the boy announced his conversion, whereupon Mary herself appeared to save the boy from burning. See Kunstmann. The story was widely illustrated also, as may be seen from the extensive listings under “Virgin Mary Miracles” at the Index for Christian Art. These include illuminations from England (Queen Mary’s Psalter, ca. 1310–20) and France (Gautier de Coincy’s Miracles de Notre Dame, i.e., the tales translated by Kunstman above; from the workshop of Jean Pucelle, dated ca. 1327). The psalter and miracle narratives may be accessed on the Index data base with code numbers 32 L84 LBR 063,207B and 32 P23 LNA 383,035A, respectively. 31. Margoliouth, 1974–75. See chapter 4. 32. Jordan, 2001; Jeremy Cohen, 1987. An English translation of Herman’s account may be found in Morrison, pp. 76–113. 33. See, for instance, the story of R. Qalonymos, whom the bishop of Mainz is at first overjoyed to see alive. But as the onslaught against the Jews continues, the bishop says, “I cannot save you because your God has turned away from you and it is not His will to even leave you a surviving remnant,” from the chronicle of Solomon bar Samson, in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 40–41. 34. Ivan Marcus, 1982 and 1990. See also Jeremy Cohen, 1994. 35. R. Hakim, “Ayyeh qinatkha,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 90–92, v. l. 36. R. Eleazar bar Nathan, “Elohim zedim qamu ‘aleinu,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 84–86, vv. 25–28. 37. Ibid., vv. 37–40. 38. R. Qalonymos bar Judah, “Et haqol qol Ya’aqov,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 64–66, vv. 25–28. 39. See Yuval. 40. The Blois incident and poetry are discussed in detail in chapter 2. 41. For a discussion of the incident and review of the sources, see Chazan, 1968 and 1994; Einbinder, 1998. Again, scholars have been more attentive to the prose texts than to the poetry. 42. For two somewhat variant lists of the martyrs’ names, see Salfeld, p. 17. The Tosafist school of exegesis achieved glory under the leadership of Jacob of Troyes (Rabbenu Tam), the grandson of the famed biblical exegete, Solomon b. Isaac (Rashi). Rabbenu Tam’s academy in Troyes produced several generations of scholars who forged a network across northern France, England, and Germany. Rabbenu Tam himself died two weeks after the Blois incident. The best overview of the Tosafist contribution is still the classic study of Urbach, 1955. See the provocative article by Soloveitchik, 1998. 43. Hillel of Bonn, “Emunei shelumei yisrael,” in Bernfeld, 1:230–36. For my full translation of the poem, see Einbinder, 2000b, pp. 537–60. 44. And again, in v. 58, “the life-force was burned but the bodies endured.” 45. For the texts of both poems, see Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 1:137–48. 46. Gershom alludes to two Talmudic passages, B. Hagigah 27a, where R.Eleazar asserts that if the blood of salamanders provides immunity to fire, “how much more so . . . scholars, whose whole body is fire.” In Berakhot 1b, the fires of Gehinom (Hell) will be cooled for those who recite the Shema’ correctly.

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47. Kanarfogel, 2000. 48. Joseph of Chartres, “Elohim be’alunu zulatkha adonim,” preserved in MS Hamburg 88, ff. 192ab, published by Roth, (1944), pp. 118–21; and Habermann, 1945a, pp. 152–54; Menahem b. Jacob of Worms, “Allelei li ki va’u,” for which I consulted a microfilm copy of Heb. Vat. 312, ff. 72a–73b; and the Salonika Maខhzor, ff. 194b–195a; Schechter, pp. 8–15; and Rosenfeld, pp. 168–70. 49. See “El evel eqra’ ve-qinah,” (I Cry Out in Mourning and Lamentation) by Judah bar Qalonymos for the martyrs of Speyer (1196), in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 155–58; “Amarrer bivekhi,” (I Shall Weep Bitterly), an anonymous lament for the Boppard martyrs (1196), in S. Bernfeld, 1:250–54 and in the Salonika Maខhzor, f. 194b. 50. Meir of Rothenburg, “Sha’ali serufah ba-esh,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 183–85. I return to this poem in chapter 4. 51. See Hillel of Bonn, “Emunei-shelumei yisrael,” vv. 21–24. 52. Esther Cohen, 1993; van D¨ulmen; Evans. 53. The incident is provoked by a disturbed Jewish youth who inadvertently kills a Christian girl. “Afterwards . . . they [the Christians] took the disturbed [youth] and [his mother’s] brothers. She sanctified the Name and they buried her alive. Her brothers they broke and hung on the wheel and stood them with the righteous saints outside of the city.” Habermann, 1945a, p. 130. 54. Yehiel ខ bar Jacob, “Yamim barhu ខ vetovah,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 172–75 and in Bernfeld, 1:278–82; Isaac bar Nathan, “Atah behartanu,” ខ in Bernfeld, 1:274–78; Joseph bar Qalonymos, “Ez’aq hamas ខ qorotai,” in Bernfeld, 1:282–85. 55. Benjamin the Scribe, “Shot hasha’arah shitu” (Take Your Stand at the Gates), vv. 6–10. This poem is the subject of chapter 4. 56. Revised Standard Version (RSV) translation. 57. See chapter 4. 58. Shatzmiller, 1995, p. 317. 59. The chronicle of Solomon bar Samson, in Habermann, 1945a, p. 44. 60. Ephraim of Bonn, “Sefer Zekhirah,” in Habermann, 1945a, p. 115. 61. Eleazar bar Judah, recounting incidents from the Third Crusade (1187), in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 162–63. The second half of the story is reported in the name of a relative. 62. See Yerushalmi, 1970; Grayzel, 1955b. 63. See the Mekhilta on Exod. 15:11, tractate Shirata, in the Jacob Lauterbach edition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976), pp. 59–61. 64. Nit’av can mean “filthy,” “loathsome,” “abominable.” Neខzer can mean “offshoot,” but neខzar would mean “one of the alleged disciples of Jesus of Nazareth” (Jastrow dictionary, 930). I assume the poet meant to echo both meanings. This is the text that appears in Habermann, 1945a, and Bernfeld. Instead of leneខzer nit’av tifnu, Petuchowski has a variant reading, lanu tiqrevu vetifnu (draw near and turn to us); see Petuchowski. 65. Isaac Bar Shalom, “Ein kamokha ba’ilmim,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 113–14; Bernfeld, 1:217–18; Petuchowski, pp. 71–83. The opening line puns on Exod.15:11 (ein kamokha ba-elim—there is none like you among the gods), a verse incorporated into the regular Jewish liturgy. 66. Ephraim of Regensberg, “Elohim bekha ehabeq,” ខ pp. 130–32.

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67. Ibid., “Ezor Neqamot,” pp. 128–30. 68. Judah bar Qalonymos, “El evel eqra,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 155–58; counting each tripartite verse as one line, the segment is from vv. 13–19. I have uniformly translated the Christian’s offer in the second person, although the Hebrew actually alternates between second- and third-person phrases. 69. The Old French lament for the martyrs of Troyes (1288) makes explicit reference to Dominicans, and one of the Hebrew laments for these martyrs mentions Franciscans and Dominicans. The references are unusual, because the poets prefer to label their enemies generically, but they are historically reliable. For the Old French poem, see the discussion below; the Hebrew lament, by Solomon Simhah ខ the Scribe, begins Shahar avi’ todah and was published by Darmesteter in 1881, pp. 227–33. Chapter 5 treats the Troyes laments in detail. 70. Curiously, of the more than seventy poems I surveyed for this study, not a single one mentions Mary, who is often satirized in prose polemical literature. See David Berger, 1979. 71. Stacey, 1992; Shatzmiller, 1995. 72. Greatex. 73. Shatzmiller, 1995, p. 316, and see above. 74. Logan; Stacey, 1993. 75. Starr. Significantly, martyrological laments have not survived from this region. 76. Jordan, 1989, p. 152. 77. Ibid., p. 150; Nahon. 78. Jordan, 1989, p. 173, and see the example on p. 175. 79. Nahon. 80. The writing on this controversy is abundant; see the discussion in chapter 4. Various scholars have striven to identify the unnamed “French rabbis” who allegedly condemned Maimonides’ philosophical writings, and then in part or whole relented, and then in (different) part or whole reinstituted their ban. The problem indicates the degree to which centralized rabbinic authority in northern France, legendary during the life of Rabbenu Tam (d.1171), was disintegrating. See Shohet; Shatzmiller, 1969 and 1970; and Urbach, 1947. 81. Shatzmiller, 1995, p. 316. 82. See Einbinder, 1999, and chapter 5. 83. Darmesteter, 1881, and Einbinder, 1999. The vernacular thus expresses the fear that lurked behind the verses of the rabbi-poets from Frankfurt in 1241. What was suppressed in their poems, and granted excessive discussion in their responsa, was the fate of their “captive women.” Jewish legal discussions assumed women like the Frankfurt fianc´ee would accept Christian husbands (or, more crudely, sexual defilement) to save their lives. In a sense, their “willingness” to be polluted by one fluid (the baptismal waters) forecast their “willingness” to be polluted by sexual fluids as well. At the same time, the vernacular expression of this fear is cast in a scene that draws on romance topoi. 84. The earliest recorded libel accusations are of course from England, not the continent, beginning with William of Norwich (1144).

TWO “THE FIRE DOES NOT BURN”: THE EMERGENCE OF A MARTYROLOGICAL MOTIF

I

N THE SPRING of 1171, the frightened (or scheming) Christian servant of a local Blois lord reported seeing a Jew toss a murdered child into the Loire River.1 No witnesses corroborated his testimony, no parents reported a missing child, and no corpse was ever produced. But the local lord to whom he told his tale had a score to settle with a prominent Jewish woman in Blois and saw an opportunity for revenge. Count Thibaut, to whom the lord turned, may or may not have given credence to the murder charge, but he had reasons of his own for exploiting it. Thibaut’s mass arrest of the Blois Jewish community was not itself a new tactic of harassment. The captio was designed to intimidate the victims into paying for their release, an effective if terrifying strategy for raising large sums of cash. But in this case the mass arrest led to an unprecedented conclusion. An Augustinian canon validated the servant’s testimony by ordeal, and ransom negotiations between the count, the imprisoned Jews, and their mediators collapsed. On May 26, 1171, by the Hebrew calendar the twentieth of Sivan of the year 4931, thirty-two Jewish men and women were burned at the stake. For the first time in medieval Jewish memory, the secular ruler charged with their protection had prosecuted his Jews and condemned them to death. Within a short time, the Blois incident was described or commemorated in a number of Hebrew documents. From the tone and content of the urgent letters that raced from nearby Jewish communities in Orl´eans, Paris, and Troyes to the Jewish communities in France and along the Rhine, we can glean both the facts of the incident and the writers’ conviction that it boded further ill. In addition to five surviving letters, commemorations of the Blois incident survived in the Sefer Zekhirah, Ephraim of Bonn’s prose chronicle of late twelfth-century persecutions; eight verse compositions; two slightly variant martyrological rosters; and a brief Christian account in the chronicle of Robert of Torigni.2 This chapter offers a close look at the poetry, which has received no serious attention on its own. One motif in particular offers insight into the methods and concerns of the Blois poets—the motif of the fireproof martyr, which emerges in the claim that the martyrs of Blois, or at least some of them, were impervious to flame. In the hands of the Blois poets, all

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men trained as Tosafist scholars, the fireproof martyr illustrates some of the theological and polemical impulses that informed Jewish martyrological poetry and that made it a powerful vehicle for addressing persecution and doubt. The multiple Hebrew records for the Blois episode, which comprise a variety of genres, confirm how greatly the incident shocked contemporary Jews. The lists of the victims are troubling enough: The majority were women, at least one of them pregnant, and several children appear also to have died in the flames. The male victims included scholars and men of stature. Ironically, the sources attest to a flourishing Jewish community, one unprepared for impending catastrophe. The rabbi-scholars who sought, in prose and verse, to record (and interpret) what went wrong capture some of the trauma and disbelief felt by their fellow Jews. Not surprisingly, each of the commemorative genres—letters, chronicle, memorial lists, and poems—expresses a particular impression of the incident. This is true of the poetic laments, too, although factual information is not their primary interest. They are more interested in depicting a sacred drama whose heroes embody the attributes of piety, learning, faith in God, and contempt for Christianity—an idealized representation of resistance to persecution as well as a source of consolation. In communicating this ideal, the poems describe a heroic martyr who looks much like their authors, as we shall see. Although our focus is on the poetry and its concerns, it is valuable by way of background and contrast to survey the prose as well. Modern scholars have concentrated their attention on the rich bounty of prose records that recount this incident. Insofar as the poems have confirmed the prose record, they have been deemed historically useful; otherwise, they have served largely to complement the “factual” description of events. In other words, the poems have been seen through prose eyes: In theoretical terms, scholars have approached these texts with a language shaped by historical, socioeconomic, or judicial concerns. This discourse has been applied fruitfully to the prose sources. Nonetheless, the verse laments represent Jewish responses to the incident that are only partially indicated by the prose.3 Because the Blois incident is so well documented, we can compare the poems, and their distinct modes of representation, to other sources. The authors of the Blois letters are interested in the personalities and tensions that culminated in calamity for the Jews. They document the efforts of the northern French Jewish communities to contain the crisis once it had erupted, detailing the events leading up to the disaster and subsequent meetings with King Louis VII, Count Henry of Champagne, and Archbishop William of Sens. Thus, while the letters do exalt the martyrs as exemplars of righteousness and faith, their primary concern is

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to communicate a sequence of political decisions and actions.4 The letter from the Orl´eans community describes the disaster as a consequence of the overweening self-confidence of the Jewish woman Pucellina. According to the authors, Pucellina, trusting in the count’s patronage, was “arrogant towards the people of the city with her” and “dealt heavily with all who came to her,” inciting the resentment of the countess, the countess’s governess, and local nobility. The local lord whose servant reports seeing a Jew throw a child in the Loire immediately understood the opportunity before him. The Orl´eans letter attributes to him the following response: “Now you be silent! This is the day I have longed for! Since the Jewish woman said such-and-such to me, so will I do such-and-such [to her]! Since she ill-treated me, so shall I ill-treat her!”5 Pucellina has long been considered a romantic figure attached to the count, whose waning affection—and wife’s jealousy—were the catalysts for a communal disaster. Her key role in the prose texts and her absence from the poetic accounts illustrate the distinct interests of the genres. Whether or not Pucellina had an emotional attachment to Count Thibaut, the wording of the Orl´eans letter implies that her importance lay more in another arena. I have suggested elsewhere that scholars influenced by romance conventions have misread Pucellina’s claim to the count’s loyalty as a question of romantic “love.” In context, the letter more likely describes a relationship of voluntary commitment, loyalty, and patronage. Indeed, the letter’s reference to city notables who “came to” the arrogant Pucellina suggests transactions between a moneylender and her clients.6 In fact, there is even stronger evidence for the financial basis of Pucellina’s activities in the statement attributed to the angry local lord. The lord’s remark echoes two biblical passages, from Lev. 24:19–20 and Deut. 19:18–19. These verses deal with restitution for damages and false testimony and were interpreted in the medieval period exclusively in terms of monetary compensation.7 Arguably, the letter alludes to financial tensions between Pucellina and her clients, who included not only the aggrieved lord but the countess and her governess. As Shalom Spiegel demonstrated years ago, Countess Alix was an important figure in her own right. The second daughter of Louis VII by his first wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, she had been betrothed and sent to Thibaut as a child shortly after the engagement of her elder sister Marie to Henry of Champagne, Thibaut’s brother. She was barely twenty years old at the time of the Blois incident. The governess mentioned in the letter most likely accompanied her from royal France and remained with her in Blois.8 All of these details provide a sharper and more detailed picture of the complex forces that led to the Blois tragedy and subsequently to its commemorative literature. In addition to pressure from his irritated wife and

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vassals, Thibaut had his own needs for cash, needs that had led French nobles and kings to a ruthless appreciation of the potential to be reaped in exploiting their Jews. These factors combined to create an atmosphere of local resentment and need conducive to a libel accusation and a captio, a mass arrest of adult Jews who could be pressured for exorbitant ransom in exchange for their release. Once upset, the delicate balance among the involved parties—the count, his vassals, the canon, and the Jews themselves—led rapidly to the stake. Significantly, Thibaut of Blois and his brothers were heirs to a long history of rivalry with the crown. The Blois counts were important if troublesome vassals to the French king, and Count Thibaut’s decision to prosecute the murder libel posed a challenge to Louis VII as well as to the Jews. Ephraim of Bonn, writing some twenty years after the tragedy, had his own perspective on this episode. With the benefit of hindsight, his chronicle contextualized Blois as the first of a series of incidents in which a secular authority defaulted on his legal responsibility to protect his Jews. To this end, Ephraim idealized the Jewish victims and manipulated his sources to accentuate the virtue of the victims and the malice of their foes. Ephraim also demonstrates familiarity with a number of stylistic techniques found in the prose vernacular literature of his time. Some, like the new interest in intentionality and perspective, characterized the new romance literature. Others, like the use of typological figures and scenes, or the symmetrical counterpointing of narrative elements, were associated with hagiography, although hagiographical writing was itself influenced by romance in this period.9 Ephraim’s chronicle shifts the emphasis of the prose letters, copies of which he clearly had before him. His embellishment of the servant’s account of his experience at the Loire relies on perspectival shifts and clever manipulations of dialogue that sketch portraits of some psychological depth. By suppressing all negative references to Pucellina, Ephraim reshapes this problematic figure while minimizing her political importance. Recast as a religious and romantic heroine, Pucellina exhorts her people like the biblical Esther and strives to intercede on their behalf.10 Correspondingly, Ephraim depicts all of the Blois martyrs as heroic, defiant, and resolutely willing to die for their faith. His prose account preserves the claim that the bodies of the Blois martyrs did not burn, as well as the story of an attempt by some martyrs to escape from the flames. So much for the main prose sources. Four liturgical poems, or piyyutim (singular: piyyut) form the heart of the following discussion. They single out a group of martyrs whose aborted attempt to escape from the flames was narrated by the earliest of the documentary letters to circulate after the incident.11 At least three of these poems portray these martyrs as immune or potentially immune to fire, while the fourth alludes to this mo-

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tif. Within the Blois corpus, this martyrological convention illuminates some of the central theological, social, and political concerns of the authors. These, in turn, suggest some of the concerns of the genre, and the role it played in shaping and sustaining the martyrocentric identity of medieval northern European Jewish communities. In using the expression “martyrocentric,” I do not mean to imply that the identity of these medieval Jews was obsessed with persecution and death. On the contrary, as the rich weave of old and new in the poems demonstrates, the Jews who wrote and heard these poems mingled faith and fury in language that conveyed to their peers and to the future a vibrant sense of themselves and their place in a larger world. The scholarpoets who commemorated the deaths of their innocent comrades appropriated elements from contemporary culture and from Jewish tradition, and crafted a new expression of communal trial and faith. The synthesis reflects the complex identity of the authors and their audiences. On the one hand, as David Berger has noted, the twelfth century was a period of “dazzling achievement” for northern European Jews, and “even the acute contemporary observer would not have seen a people poised at the edge of a precipice.”12 The polemical exchanges of the twelfth century reflect a “proud and assertive Jewish community,” one that partook in great measure of the cultural achievements of the time.13 On the other hand, anguish reverberates in poetic descriptions of crusader and mob violence following the First and Second Crusades, and that anguish did not ebb as the twelfth century progressed. Relations between the Jewish communities of northern France and Ashkenaz were close, but northern French Jews escaped the brutal violence that befell the Rhineland communities during the First Crusade. With the rise of the northern French academies, many young Rhenish Jews came to France to study and then returned home to positions of prominence. Their writing indicates some of their concerns. Twelfth-century Hebrew laments decry the desecration of Jewish books, the forced baptism of Jewish men and women, and the agony of Jewish humiliation and suffering in the wake of Christian attacks. At the same time, a lively and aggressive polemical literature flourishes, the rabbis advance innovative approaches to sacred texts and laws, and their devotional poetry attests in abundance to the self-image of a proud and pious Jewish world. Neither the secular nor ecclesiastical authorities had endorsed the violence of 1096, and in fact the deliberate measures they took to avoid their recurrence in 1147 were largely effective. Blois thus marked the beginning of a different experience of persecution, in which secular and ecclesiastical power bore down on the Jews. To the degree it was coordinated, the Jewish response was also institutional, emerging largely from the ranks of the Tosafist rabbis, whose intellectual and commercial con-

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tacts extended over the French, Norman, and Rhenish communities.14 From this network emerged the figure most representative of Jewish selfconfidence and cultural accomplishment—the scholar-elite of the French Tosafist academies. It is no wonder if the Tosafist response to the tragedy was both literate and literary, and no wonder if it exalted an image of martyrdom that reflected the values the Tosafists held dear. Not only had the Tosafist scholars lost several comrades among the Blois victims, but in no small tribute to their own sense of their importance, they shaped their poetic memorials to reinforce the reputation of their colleagues. This process is reflected in the emergence of the fireproof martyr. The image of the scholar-rabbi as the idealized martyr also reflects Tosafist perception that as an elite, they constituted a target for conversionary pressure (and may have been vulnerable to that pressure ) in ways other elements of Jewish society were not. Indeed, over the next century, the motif of the incombustible martyr evolves with the erosion of Tosafist authority in the Jewish communities of northern France and the Rhineland. We will follow this process in subsequent chapters. For now, however, we stand at its beginnings, as they are preserved in the Blois laments. These poems were designed for penitential liturgies and conveyed a fairly consistent theological message. Faced with the possibility that their sufferings signified abandonment by God, the piyyutim sought to reassure their listeners while communicating a set of ideals and behaviors to ensure Jewish survival through persecutions to come. Two prose sources—the letter from Orl´eans and Ephraim of Bonn’s later recapitulation—also depict the miraculous immunity to fire of the Blois martyrs. In the prose narratives, this scene highlighted the contrast between the three leaders of the Blois Jewish community to that of the Christian officials and the hysterical crowd.15 The Jewish victims represent innocence and righteousness before evil intent and unruly violence. At the same time, the authors express a polemical disdain for Christianity’s dependence upon irrational beliefs and “miraculous” events. In contrast, the poetry has a different emphasis altogether. The Blois poets also juxtapose the sanctity of the martyrs to the viciousness of the mob. But repeatedly, the voice of the martyrs speaking from the flames is fused with the voice of divine revelation at Sinai. The union of revelation and death, an image tendering vengeance as much as consolation, echoes Peter Brown’s observation that the sufferings of the righteous were a sign that “God’s mighty hand reached down into the present, with magnificent declaratory effect.”16 All of the Blois poems raise fascinating questions about the literary type of the ideal martyr and his designated audience. Five of the six Blois poets were Tosafist scholars, men associated with the rabbinical school

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centered about Rabbenu Tam in Troyes. The Blois sources confirm that this rabbinic network was almost instantly activated to negotiate with the Christian authorities. But it was also enlisted to interpret and to lay the groundwork for a theological and behavioral response to future incidents of persecution.17 Without exception, the poems elevate the scholar-rabbi to the post of ideal martyr. As the “typical” Blois martyr was not a scholar, the literary ideal suggests the authors’ desire to reinforce traditional authority and institutions in times of upheaval. Moreover, other elements of the poems indicate that their authors were playing to two types of audiences. One was the larger lay male community of Jews, who would have been impressed by the dramatic imagery of the poetry even if they did not understand the erudite allusions of the texts. Yet a second audience was the circle of Tosafist scholars and students who could decode the poetic texts. For these men, the reflection of their own image in depictions of heroic martyrdom reinforced a sense of their own importance. Before proceeding further, a description of the poetic texts is in order. The unburned martyrs appear in four, or half, of the Blois laments. “Emunei shelumei yisrael” (O Faithful, Peaceable Ones of Israel), by Hillel of Bonn, is unusual for its narrative coherence and heralds many of the motifs that reappear in the other poetic compositions.18 Drawing on the familiar imagery of Daniel and the less obvious biblical precedent of Nadab and Abihu, Hillel made the fireproof martyrs central to his poem. Yom Tov of Joigny’s balladlike lament, “Yah tishpokh hamatkha,” ខ (Lord Pour Out Your Wrath) focuses on two of the fireproof martyrs.19 Although Yom Tov is known for a number of legal decisions, his poetry is rarely mentioned.20 The strophic form of this lament and its wobbly affinity for quantitative meter indicate familiarity with contemporary developments in Hebrew writing in Spain.21 Yom Tov’s presence among the Blois poets is also significant because the chroniclers who recorded his death among the martyrs of York in 1190 attributed to him a major role in that tragic event, which cost the lives of some 150 Jews. According to Jewish and Christian sources, it was R. Yom Tov who suggested that the terrified Jews in York tower commit suicide.22 The chronicler thus implies that the English Jews were unfamiliar with the model of active martyrdom espoused by the northern French rabbi, who conveys to them a French Jewish cultural model. The rabbi transmits this martyrological ideal—not only in poetry, but by personally slaughtering some sixty York Jews.23 The two other poems that focus on the miracle in the fire are both by a Rhenish legal scholar, Gershom bar Isaac. One poem, “Ish levush habadim” (The Man Clothed in Linen), is a long composition in quatrains and acrostic; the other, “Ge’al lekha atah ge’ulati” (Redeem Me Yourself ), is apparently a sequel to the first poem.24 Both poems are heavily

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allusive, and the audience able to decode and understand them would have been elite and probably small. Nonetheless, recurring images of fire and revelation, suffering and atonement, break the dense surface of the poetry. Even without a precise understanding of their meaning, these images, and their emotional echoes, would have reached a majority of the listeners. The level of difficulty of these poems (often a matter of identifying allusions to other texts) varies from poet to poet. Gershom’s poems were accessible only to a Jew steeped in rabbinic learning. For the less literate, a combination of vivid imagery and mini-narratives would have had a wider reach and appeal. Four additional poems by Ephraim of Bonn, Joseph bar Isaac (Bekhor Shor) of Orl´eans, and Baruch of Mainz complete the list of Blois laments; these do not concentrate on the scene in the fire but enlist the language of the ordeal. (In a sense, Yom Tov’s lament mediates between this set and the three poems that treat the incident as a miracle.) I will return to these poems in concluding. Finally, although Leon Weinberger published a lament by Abraham bar Samuel in 1977, which he identified as a “new lament for the martyrs of Blois,” I do not include this among the Blois poems.25 As the brother of Judah heHasid, whose Pietist school rivaled the Tosafists’, this poet would have offered an interesting contrast to the Tosafist authors and their lyrics. However, close scrutiny of the microfilm of the manuscript does not confirm Weinberger’s identification. As noted, the miracle of the fireproof martyrs begins with a letter sent by the Jewish community of Orl´eans immediately following the execution in Blois. The Orl´eans author begins with an elegiac, if generic, depiction of the imprisoned Blois Jews who responded with contempt to a last offer to save their lives by conversion. “How shall we fear this fire? For on this day we have been chosen!”26 Willingly offering their lives, the martyrs were executed before dawn, singing as they burned. At this point, the author narrates a disturbance at the auto-da-f´e: There were two “kohanim” bound to a single stake. They called out to the servants of Thibaut the evil foe, saying, “Behold, we are in this fire but it has no power over us.” They [the Christians] said: “Come out of it.”27 R. Judah bar Aaron severed [the bonds from] his hands and then also the bonds of his companions’ hands, and they said, “Let us go out. If they kill us, we will die, and if they let us live, we will live.” The three of them went out, and the enemy rose against them and beat them severely. There these saints died before God. Unwilling to let a foolish word leave their mouths, they remained righteous from beginning to end. [The Christians] threw them back on the fire and covered them with embers but they were

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not burned. These things were told to us by men of our city and acquaintances who were at the scene.28 In this early version, it is the dead bodies of the three martyrs that do not burn, a miracle later extended to all of the martyrs: And so the uncircumcised testify, that their bodies did not burn. Only those who hate them say their bodies burned, and it would seem they said so in hatred.29 In contrast, the dramatic near escape from the fire is reported as a ruse desperately conceived to appeal to the angry but gullible mob. The living men who leap from the flames are not immune to fire but hope the crowd will believe they are. They had every reason to believe they might: Many Christians affirmed the efficacy of the ordeal, and the Blois victims knew that their doom had been sealed by an ordeal of water. Jewish contempt for Christian justice rendered by means of the ordeal received pithy expression in Ephraim of Bonn’s later version of this incident. “For these are the judgments of the Christians, how they try matters according to their faith—laws which are no good and judgments it is impossible to live by!”30 At least one contemporary Christian author, ironically, also acknowledged Jewish indifference to the miraculous signs God supplied in the ordeal. Guibert of Nogent, in his polemic against the Jews, constructed a fictional dialogue between a Jew and a Christian cleric in which the cleric grasped a burning firebrand to prove the truth of his position. Although the cleric proved impervious to the flame, “the Jew marveled but was nonetheless not impelled to convert.”31 Ephraim’s prose version of this episode adds a few details, which he may have gleaned from sources now lost, but remains faithful to the scene depicted in the letter:32 Then the foe commanded [his men] to take two priests of righteousness, the pious Rabbi Yehiel bar David the Kohen [priest] and the righteous Rabbi Yequtiel bar Judah the Kohen, and they tied them to a single stake in the burning scaffold because both were men of valor, [who were] students of Rabbenu Samuel and Rabbenu Jacob. They also tied the hands of Rabbi Judah be-rabbi Aaron. Then they ignited the kindling and the fire caught and severed the bonds about their hands. The three of them came out and said to the foe’s vassals: “Behold, the fire has no power over us—why can’t we go free?” Then they said to them: “Not on your lives will you get out of this.” But they struggled to get out. Then they returned them again to the fire. But they kept getting out, and caught hold of a Christian to bring with them into the fire. When they drew near the fire, the uncircumcised ones gained strength and took the Christian from

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them. Then they slew them there with swords and cast them into the fire. But they were not burned, not them and not the others, thirty-two souls: Just their souls were burned but the body endured. The uncircumcised ones saw and said to each other in wonder: “Surely these are saints!”33 Ephraim has identified all three of the martyrs who attempted to escape, describing two of them as students of “Rabbenu Samuel and Rabbenu Jacob”—Rabbis Samuel ben Meir (the “Rashbam”) and Jacob Tam, Rashi’s grandsons and heads of the leading Tosafist academies in northern France. The poets, also graduates of these academies, may well have known the men personally. Ephraim adapts the Orl´eans letter’s report of the aborted escape so that it becomes a plan to deceive the Christians by pretending to be unburned. He thus allows his readers to believe, should they so wish, that a miracle occurred. The martyrs’ near success in killing a Christian attacker is also an addition. Ephraim’s account in his Sefer Zekhirah, his prose chronicle of persecutions, was written some twenty years after the event. Between the prose version preserved in the letter from Orl´eans and the elegant narrative of the chronicle lie the poems, in which the dramatic scene depicted by the Orl´eans writer was transformed by several poets into a miraculous event. The laments that treat this episode reconfigure elements of the narrative so that the living men, miraculously unburned, speak to their listeners from the fire. To a degree, this transformation was rooted in the belief (Jewish and Christian) that the bodies of the righteous were immune to physical corruption. For Christians, confirmation of this belief might come with the apparent resistance to decay of the corpses of the holy, or in the discovery of incorrupt remains years after burial.34 Rabbinic tradition also preserved a preoccupation with the notion that the bodies of especially holy or righteous men were immune to decay.35 This belief found special application to the body of the martyr.36 The circumstances of the martyr’s death often made burial difficult or impossible: The victims’ bodies were severely mutilated and, if not incinerated, left exposed for display. The belief in the incombustibility of the righteous dead, as a sign of their righteousness, would have a long life. In Christian sources, incombustibility of some sort has been attributed to martyrs from the medieval period through the modern. The examples from hagiographical texts are abundant, but the motif surfaces elsewhere, too. The executioner’s report of the death of Jeanne d’Arc insists her heart did not burn, for instance, and the late Robert Scribner documented any number of claims that portraits of Luther were incombustible.37 The miraculous preservation of the Blois corpses locates this motif in a Jewish setting. Here, initially, it testi-

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fies to the piety of the victims and offers theological reassurance that the bodies of the martyrs can be stored for future resurrection. The motif evolves into a more dramatic (and practical) miracle that sustains living men in the fire—a variation with obvious appeal. One obvious biblical resource for illustrating this motif is the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the fiery furnace, and indeed both Jewish and Christian authors exploited this scene.38 Curiously, the Blois authors, beginning with the Orl´eans writer, also had recourse to the biblical tale of Nadab and Abihu, the two sons of Aaron incinerated in the Tabernacle for “offering strange fire” (Lev. 10:1–3). Describing their deaths as a kind of divine electrocution, the rabbis spoke of serefat hanefesh veha-guf qayyam—the “soul” (life-force) was burned while the body endured.39 Although the story of Nadab and Abihu had largely negative associations for both rabbinic and medieval commentators, at least one tradition describes the brothers as martyrs.40 Blois poets combined allusions to this story with allusions to Daniel in order to fluctuate between a focus on the three men in the fire and the two kohanim (descendents of the biblical priests) among them. Ephraim of Bonn’s identification of Yehiel and Yequtiel as students of “R. Jacob and R. Meir” singled out these two for distinction. Consequently, the inclination to depict the men as a trio competes with the desire to single out two of them—a preliminary indication that the ideal martyr resembled his authors. Hillel of Bonn described the unburning of Yehiel and Yequtiel midway through his poem: The youthful “priests” were bound in a pair Yehiel and Yequtiel, in priesthood and service. Together, they were stretched on the stake to be bound, They who were pleasing in their lives and in their death.41 The language of the stanza evokes a chain of associations. The expression zuvgu . . . ba’anivatam (bound in a pair) echoes a midrashic passage describing the people of Israel at Sinai, gathered to receive the Torah.42 Besides linking the martyrs’ willingness to die to their religious observance, this allusion connects the anniversary of the martyrs’ death (two weeks from Shavuot) to the theme of that holiday—the giving of the Law. At the same time, the third verse of the quatrain, with a different word for “binding” (kafat), alludes to Daniel’s three friends in the furnace and procedures described in rabbinic law for administering judicial punishment; in the midrash it refers also to the binding of Isaac.43 The truncated last verse of the stanza, taken from 2 Sam. 1:23, would have been completed by the listeners: “[they who were] pleasing in their lives were not separated in their deaths.” In four verses, Hillel has sketched the

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exemplary qualities of the martyrs, their religious obedience, their unity, and their voluntary martyrdom. Two stanzas later, he resumes their tale: When the fire reached the bonds of the kohanim’s hands The ties were severed from these men’s hands They cried out: “The fire has tested us and we are innocent!” The kings and princes of the earth were unmoved [Ps. 2:2]! (vv. 40–44) Unlike the Orl´eans author, Hillel does not imply that the Jews were attempting to exploit Christian na¨ıvet´e. Rather, the poet describes a miraculous sign from God—a sign, however, that the Christian onlookers refuse to acknowledge: The tormentor’s rage against them did not diminish. He commanded his servants to return them to the pyre Beaten and wounded. They were struck with clubs and staves. Requite them, O Lord, according to their deeds [Lam. 3:64]! (vv. 45–48) Two more stanzas lament the felling of three “warriors” who are “laid out before the Lord” (Josh. 7:23) and whose deaths atone for the people’s sins (vv. 54–56, 67). A third stanza underlines the miraculous element of their deaths: This sacrifice is a great sign and wonder that should be glorified:44 The life was burned but the body was not destroyed. Eyes saw and ears heard and wondered, A banner to wave for Truth’s sake, Selah [Ps. 60:6 ⳱ RSV 60:4] (vv. 57–60) A divine sign (resistance to flame) proclaims the men’s innocence to all who can see and accept its import. Medieval listeners who recognized the concluding verse, which is drawn from Ps. 60:6 (⳱ RSV 60:4), knew Rashi’s explication of it as well. According to Rashi, the psalmist referred not only to a “banner to wave for Truth’s sake,” but “a trial which they endured for the sake of Truth,” or God. Thus the trials of the righteous martyrs, and the visible agony of their suffering, were public testimonies to God’s presence and power, and not to divine indifference or impotence. The poem continues first with a plea to the Jews to commemorate the anniversary of the martyrdom with fasting and prayers and then with a plea to God to hearken to their calls for vengeance. Both the reassurance and the recommendation serve to invigorate communal morale and ratify traditional authority and religious performance, in the form of penitential observances and sumptuary restrictions.45 In this regard, the poems affirm

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the intention of some of the letters—the Orl´eans letter, which calls for instituting an annual fast day, and the letter from Troyes, which calls for a fast and sumptuary constraints of limited duration: And God smelled the savory offering on Wednesday the 20th of the month of Sivan in the year 4831 [⳱ 1171 c.e.], which should be declared a fast day for all our people. And the fast will be greater than the fast of Gedaliah ben Ahiqem, for it is a day of atonement.46 And we, the petty [men and women] of Troyes, have decreed for ourselves and for our area of settlement to invite only local members of the community to wedding festivities, but if there are not enough men for a prayer quorum, then some may be added from elsewhere. Moreover, we have prohibited ourselves from wearing silk mantles for three years, both men and women. And we men have taken it upon ourselves to fast on Mondays and Thursdays until the New Year, and so all the region of Lorraine decrees for itself.47 As David Wachtel has observed, neither letter seems to be aware of the proscription of the other. Moreover, there is no evidence that any fast day for the Blois martyrs was actually observed until after the Chmielnitzki massacre, when a retrospective identification with the medieval martyrdom revived interest in commemorating the incident.48 Whether the other restrictions were observed is unknown. Rabbenu Tam, whose authority presumably backed the Troyes letter, died two weeks after the auto-da-f´e, and no mention of the fast day or other restrictions survives. Nonetheless, the Troyes letter and Hillel’s poem tell us that the rabbis thought in terms of these kinds of ritual responses. Liturgy, as well as communal ritual, continued to offer a means for gestures of identification with the martyrs and with the values concentrated in their tales. This is a point to which I return in the following chapters. Its importance lies both in asking us to situate martyrological poetry in a larger ritual context, and in suggesting how a repertoire of nontextual gestures reinforced the esoteric message of martyrological texts.

Yom Tov of Joigny Unlike Hillel, Yom Tov of Joigny was not interested in narrative verse, and if we did not know the Blois story from other sources, it would be impossible to derive it from his poem. The poem contains four strophes with a refrain carved from the closing lines of the first stanza, evoking Andalusian models or even local ballad forms. Yom Tov’s treatment of the fire incident is unique among the Blois poems, because although he focuses on this scene, he does not develop it as a miracle or ordeal for the

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victims so much as a test of the community. The refrain couplet refers to a familiar motif: Before I ask / answer a weary soul And let all the house of Israel / weep for the burning. The last line, from Lev. 10:6, describes Moses telling Aaron’s surviving sons how to mourn the dead Nadab and Abihu. The allusion indicates that the lament was designated for a communal, penitential liturgy. Moreover, it focuses the listeners’ attention on two heroic martyrs, the incombustible Yehiel and Yequtiel. Allusions to various details of the Blois story are scattered through Yom Tov’s verses. The first strophe, drawing on Joel 1, reminds the listeners of that prophet’s call for a day of fasting and atonement, again implying that a fast-day was intended, if not realized, for the martyrs. Israel’s sins have brought a terrible plague upon them, and “fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness” (Joel 1:19–20). Each strophe details some aspect of the martyrdom, beseeching God to intervene on behalf of His stricken people. In the second strophe, the poet describes the tortured martyrs set ablaze. Either they or their children are in shackles, their flesh torn. The third strophe describes the martyrs’ refusal to convert and the cruelty of their enemies. For their faith, the martyrs are “given to thorns and briers” (l.16). Yom Tov refers to the kindling that surrounds the pyre. But the phrase is taken from Isa.10:17, where God mocks the deluded nations who think their triumph over Israel is their own doing instead of realizing they are his instruments.49 The poet memorializes Yehiel as a warrior: Among Your pious ones, remember Yehiel / who fought with Brandished arm. (l.21) The final strophe challenges God to avenge the “deaths of my priests [kohanai],” and refers to Yequtiel, who “yearned for Your Name” (l.28). The two martyrs whom Yom Tov identifies by name are the two he probably knew personally or knew about, as they were students of his teacher, R. Tam. The terse encomiums for Yehiel and Yequtiel, drawn from the language of battle and the language of love, encapsulate the heroic ideal of the scholar-martyr. Who expressed his love for God as valiantly as the scholar-martyr transmitting Torah to Israel and interceding on her behalf before God? In martyrdom, the scholar-hero realized the crown of both labors, which he continued to perform after death. There is no reason to assume that Yom Tov’s grief was not real. But as Haym Soloveitchik has observed, the northern French Tosafists hardly suffered from low self-esteem.50 Leaders in life, they envisioned the privi-

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lege they enjoyed on earth to extend beyond death. After all, how could God deprive his shepherds in this world of flocks in the next? Centuries later, their conviction offers us a glimpse of Tosafist thinking and its blend of self-assurance and stubborn piety. These values are reflected in the figure of the ideal martyr who is featured in their poems and who becomes, in turn, a vehicle for their affirmation. One consequence of this literary convention is to make us wonder who most needed its reassurance. Was it a dismayed and daunted laity, or the Jewish elite? In chapter 1, I suggested that the poetry of martyrdom sought to reinforce the faith of young, educated Jews who were particularly susceptible to conversionary pressures. Gershom bar Isaac’s laments illustrate why such an audience would have found special meaning in these poems.

Gershom bar Isaac Gershom bar Isaac wrote two commemorative laments for the Blois martyrs. In “Ish levush ha-badim” (The Man Clothed in Linen), the poet refers to the martyrs’ deaths as expiation for communal sins, a theme that has surfaced in the preceding poems. The fire scene is linked to this theme of vicarious atonement: The reason the heroic men are not immune to the flames is because their lives atone for the sins of others. Otherwise, the poet implies, they would indeed have merited being fireproof, as did their exemplary ancestors. The second poem, “Ge’al lekha atah ge’ulati” (Redeem Me Yourself ) concentrates on the moment when the men, burning but still alive, cry out to the crowd from the flames. Miraculously, the voice of the (temporarily) living men fuses with the voice of revelation at Sinai.51 The movement from vulnerability in the first lament to renewal and revelation allows Gershom to lead his listeners from spiritual dismay to renewed conviction by converting the symbols of their debasement into signs of triumph. “Ish levush ha-badim” begins with a reproach to God. God sent Gabriel to save the innocent of Jerusalem, intervened on Abraham’s behalf at the binding of his son, and sustained Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the fiery furnace. Where is that God now? In the ancient past, the martyrs’ righteousness would have saved them, as Gershom suggests by alluding to the fireproofing ointments of a halcyon age: Where then is the hope of the remnant of the mighty? A Hewn from the snows of Zalmon and anointed with salamander? (vv. 13–14)

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The text, cryptic at first reading, alludes to two Talmudic passages. In Hagigah 27a, R. Eleazar asserts that scholars are immune to fire: It is an ad majus conclusion [to be drawn] from the salamander. If [in the case of] the salamander, which is merely created from fire, he who anoints himself with its blood is not affected by fire, how much more so the scholars, whose whole body is fire, for it is written, “Is not My word like fire? says the Lord” [Jer. 23:29]. Similarly, in Berakhot 15b, a discussion of Ps. 68:15—“those in shadowy darkness [ខzalmon] shall be whitened”—leads to a claim that the fires of Gehinom will be cooled for those who recite the Shema’ correctly. Yet the fiery verses that seal each of Gershom’s quatrains remind his listeners that the merited immunity was not enacted in Blois. Because of their singular righteousness, the Blois martyrs must die, in order to atone for an ancient sin. Thus tragedy befell the “students of Torah [tofsei-ខhayyim].”52 Gershom’s second poem, “Ge’al lekha atah ge’ulati,” describes Israel’s persecution and humiliation, concluding each quatrain with a biblical verse referring to fire. The first quatrain alludes to Sinai: Redeem me Yourself from the evil ones, Lifting up in consolation the reviled, the flagellated and burned, They who mention Your Holy Name and delight in Your faith From the midst of the fire, you hear the sound of speech. (vv. 1–4) The quatrain begins with a verse from Ruth, read annually on Shavuot, the holiday celebrating the gift of the Law at Sinai. It concludes with the description in Deut. 4:6 of the wilderness scene in which the Israelites receive the Ten Commandments. The verses may therefore signal the designated use of the poems for the anniversary of the martyrdom, which we recall took place close to the festival.53 The word mefurgal (flagellated) strengthens the link between martyrdom and ritual observance. The term appears in a midrashic commentary to Leviticus: The wicked will see and be angry. When? With the exalting of the reviled [Ps. 12:9]. When the Holy One Blessed Be He exalts those despised by the world for [their adherence to] the commandments. Why are you taken out to be stoned? Because I circumcized my son. Why are you taken out to be burned? Because I honored the Sabbath. Why are you taken out to be slain? Because I ate unleavened bread. Why are you taken out to be lashed with the whip [be-firgul]? Because I made a Sukkah, because I waved the lulav, because I laid tefillin, because I wore a fringed garment, because I did the will of [my] Father in Heaven.54

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The quatrain is sealed with the voice from the fire, in its biblical context God’s, now the speech of the martyrs as well. Gershom turns to the three martyrs in the flames: You, O Lord, can have compassion when I feel slaughtered in my bones By the ones who say “Where is your God?” while striking my cheek. I hoped for protection, O Living God, my Promise! He spoke from the fire like us and lived [cf. Deut. 5:23]. (vv. 45–48) Again, the poet has transformed a biblical verse (Deut. 5:23), so that the voice of the burning martyr fuses with the voice of God. In a familiar polemical motif, the Christian oppressor asks the Jews why their God has deserted them in their hour of need. This taunting scenario recurs so frequently in Jewish martyrological literature that its authors must have felt the argument had some force. Was not the deplorable humiliation of the Jews a sign that their chosenness, like their Law, had been superseded? The traditional Jewish response to this challenge reduced the oppressor to an instrument with which God chastized his wayward people, whom soon enough he would forgive again. One martyrological version of this argument claimed the martyrs as expiatory offerings for communal sins. Thus, God merely repossesses his prize assets: Behold, You have taken Your wealth and assets, Lambs for each household, writhing in blood. They were suspended in fire, the three noble leaders. For He is like the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap [Mal. 3:2]. (vv. 53–56) Like “sacrificial lambs for each household,” the martyrs reaffirm the covenant between God and Israel. The covenant of blood in Ezek. 16:6 completes the image. The three men are “suspended in the fire,” an allusion to Cant. 2:5, in which the beloved of Solomon calls out “samkhuni ba’ashishot” (now understood to mean “sustain me with raisins”). The Targum, the early Aramaic translation of the Bible, read this verse as an allegorical description of a voice from the fire (mego eshata) commanding Moses and Aaron to receive the Law. The midrash expands: Samkhuni ba’ashishot: Between fires—the fire from above and the fire from below . . . or the Written Law and the Oral Law . . . Or the fire of Abraham, Moriah and the bush, and the fire of Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah . . .55

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The quatrain closes with Mal. 3:2, depicting God cleansing the people of sin. The martyrs are the agent of this collective purification. The poem concludes with a call for vengeance. What can we say about the significance of this scene and how it was represented? Like Hillel and Yom Tov, Gershom has shaped a penitential poem around the scene in the fire. All three poets stressed the social and religious distinction of the martyr-heroes, two of whom were priests and scholars. For Gershom, the martyrs are men of physical might, intellectual gifts, and communal stature who were persecuted and slain for observance of the Law.56 These terms conform the martyrs to an ideal type that was hardly represented in the profile of the Blois victims, over half of whom were women. All of these poems would have been understood at different levels according to the learning of the listener. Because of its narrative style, Hillel’s poem was accessible even to men who did not grasp all of its allusions. More difficult in language, Yom Tov’s poem enlisted vivid imagery and a contemporary musical style, encouraging listeners to anticipate and join in the refrain. Gershom’s poems offered the dramatic image of the men speaking in the fire; for his more educated listeners, the lyrics endorsed their roles and sense of mission. This was not merely a selfserving portrait. The merit of the rabbinic elite was communicated in images of terrible suffering and death, a willingness to forfeit honorifics, family, and wealth for the sake of God’s Name. In elevating the scholar-rabbi to the post of the ideal martyr, the poems of Hillel, Yom Tov, and Gershom offer a literary representation of religious persecution and resistance as a war waged by both Jews and Christians from the top down. The poems suggest that Christian authorities prized prominent converts and exerted pressure on Jewish leaders to win them. Correspondingly, Jewish resistance is depicted in terms of the heroic defiance of precisely these leaders. This scenario stands in marked contrast to that preserved in the 1096 chronicles and laments, which portray great diversification among the Christians and Jews.57 Was the Jewish elite more vulnerable to conversionary efforts? In addition to the evidence offered in chapter 1, the image of rabbinic fortitude preserved in the literature may be read as an expression of concern. Did a campaign of moral fortification aimed at the academies and their young students motivate the evolution of the martyrological hero? Certainly, the more recondite piyyutim of poets like Gershom bar Isaac or Baruch of Mainz would not have been comprehended far beyond that orbit. Does the narrative clarity of Ephraim and Hillel of Bonn’s laments target a different kind of audience? How less educated Jews assimilated the martyrological conventions of the literature is difficult to gauge and a topic for a later chapter. However, the references to penitential observances

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remind us that even the most arcane martyrological texts were reinforced by rituals and music that were accessible to all. Four Blois poems, as mentioned earlier, do not represent the fire miracle. Instead, these poems exploit the language of the ordeal. This motif, too, permits the poets to articulate similar concerns to those that emerge around the convention of incombustibility. Joseph bar Isaac (Bekhor Shor) of Orl´eans’ lament, “Adonai eleikha ‘einai yesabberu” refers obliquely to the ordeals of water and fire.58 Deceived and betrayed, the martyrs are an emblem for Israel, who has been “tested in water / while the fire burned before him” (l.8). Although this dual “test” alludes to the use of ordeals in the Blois prosecution, it meshes neatly with the map of Israelite history as well—Israel tested in the water of the Red Sea and brought to the fire of Sinai. The “ordeal” thus emphasizes Israel’s faith more than God’s miraculous intervention; this is consistent with Bekhor Shor’s rationalist temperament and his distaste for miracles.59 Baruch of Mainz combines the fire of divine revelation with that of the auto-da-f´e.60 In a future time, God will mete out a blazing retribution upon Israel’s enemies, and then You shall not be burned in the fire and the flame shall not consume you [cf. Isa. 43:2]. (v. 140) However, as the lament makes clear, this was not an outcome that either the martyrs, no less the survivors, could count on in the present. Finally, Ephraim of Bonn, Hillel’s brother, wrote two poems for the Blois martyrs that have extensive recourse to the motif of the ordeal. “Asikhah be-mar nafshi” (Let Me Speak in Bitterness) incorporates the factual details of the execution date, the physical abuse of the martyrs, and the presence of men, women, and children among them. The martyrs are described as scholars and as sacrificial offerings. Perhaps the most famous of the Blois laments, Ephraim of Bonn’s “Lemi oy lemi avoy” (Who Has Woe, Who Has Sorrow), is unusual in both form and content.61 The lament recasts several phrases from the Orl´eans letter as verse.62 Meir alludes to the servant’s ordeal by water, but not to the episode in the fire. Rather, persecution as a series of trials surmounted in different ages becomes the dominant theme of Ephraim’s lament. The speaker of the poem, in the collective voice of his people, cries aloud his anguish over the endless tests to which God has subjected him. Broken and shattered, he has survived every ordeal. Ephraim’s lack of emphasis on the fire incident is surprising, especially since years later it would assume a central place in the Sefer Zekhirah. This is one indication that within a relatively short period of time, the poetic conventions took hold. Ephraim’s lament

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for the Blois martyrs mined the prose letter from Orl´eans, but twenty-five years later poetic conventions were shaping his prose. As miracle and test, the incident at Blois was swiftly reframed as a symbolic ordeal of fire whose blaze originated in Sinai and whose terrifying promise would continue to test Jewish communities through one wearying trial after another. Over the next century, the image of the martyr who triumphed over fire found a home in both popular imagination and in esoteric texts. In chapter 6, we explore a later example. For now, it suffices to note that later stories of incombustible Jewish martyrs, whether literary or anecdotal, suggest that the motif of incombustibility did not develop in quite the direction that the early Tosafists envisioned. The later examples no longer reverberate with the echoes of collective revelation and renewal, and even the most literary of them, a lament by Solomon bar Simhah ខ for thirteen martyrs burned at Troyes in 1288, prefers images of personal transfiguration over those of Sinai.63 The anecdotal evidence suggests that immunity to flame did not just illustrate a theological point; it was a desirable quality for practical reasons, too. As we shall see in the case of Jonathan of Paris, a late thirteenthcentury martyr, the average Jew, perhaps, found revelation a less pressing concern than the ability to withstand pain. Thus, in the late thirteenth century, Meir of Rothenburg asserted that martyrs did not feel pain while burning—admittedly less useful than being fireproof, but still a valuable attribute. This claim was repeated in the late fifteenth century by the Spanish rabbi, Isaac Aboab, and in seventeenth-century Amsterdam by Saul Morteira.64 In Spain, some Jews even tried to train for such resistance, as attested by the meditation techniques recommended in the Megillat Amrafel. In sum, the belief had a long life. The brilliance of Tosafist scholarship, although still admired, did not sustain itself beyond the thirteenth century. Scholars debate the extent to which external considerations—persecution among them—were responsible for the waning of Tosafist creativity in later years. The Blois laments, however, date from the pinnacle of Tosafist achievement and glory. It is no coincidence that Tosafist poetry reflects the writers’ conviction that in their own image Judaism could best survive the challenges and trials that confronted it. It is worth asking whether the poetic conventions of the literature reflect the shifting fortunes of Tosafist power during the difficult decades of the following century.

Notes The core of this chapter is based on a paper presented in March 1999 at the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies in Philadelphia. I am grateful to the partici-

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pants of the seminar on Hebrew Poetry and Culture for their comments and suggestions, as well as to director David Ruderman for his invitation to present my work there. 1. On the Blois incident, see Chazan, 1968, and more recently, Chazan, 1994; and Einbinder, 1998. 2. The sources are listed in Chazan, 1968. They include the letters from Orl´eans, Paris, Troyes, and the letter of Nathan bar Meshullam; these were published by Neubauer and Stern, pp. 31–35 and Habermann, 1945a, pp. 142–46; the letter by Ovadiah bar Makir may be found in the appendix to Shalom Spiegel, 1953, pp. 285–87. For Ephraim of Bonn’s account, see Neubauer and Stern, pp. 66–69 (⳱ Habermann, 1945a, pp. 124–26) or Ephraim of Bonn, 1970, pp. 30– 33. The two lists of martyrs’ names are in Siegmund Salfeld, pp. 16–17. The seven poems (only four of which are listed by Chazan) are: (1) Ephraim of Bonn’s “Le-mi oy le-mi avoy,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 133–36; in A. Berliner, pp. 9–11; and in Bernfeld, 1:225–29; (2) Hillel of Bonn, “Emunei shelumei yisrael,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 137–41 and in Bernfeld, 1:230–36; (3) Yom Tov of Joigny, “Yah tishpokh hamatkha,” ខ in Schirmann, 1939, pp. 36–37; (4) Baruch of Magenza (Mainz), “Esh okhlah esh,” in Baruch of Magenza, pp. 133– 40; (5) Gershom bar Isaac, “Ish levush habadim,” in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 1:137–43; (6) also by Gershom bar Isaac, “Ge’ol lekha atah ge’ulati,” in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 1:143–48; and (7) Joseph bar Isaac of Orl´eans, “Adonai eleikha ‘einai yesaberu,” Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 1:163–65. For Robert of Torigni’s account, see Howlett, 1889, pp. 250–52; for an English translation, see The Chronicles of Robert de Monte, pp. 114–15. 3. For the relationship between the prose and the poetry, see the posthumously published article by Gerson Cohen, 1993, pp. 36–53, in which he speculates that the prose functioned as a liturgical commentary to the poetry; Ivan Marcus has also commented on the performative aspects of the 1096 chronicles; see Marcus, 1982, pp. 40–52. Nonetheless, it is not clear in what kind of setting these texts would have been “performed,” nor is there, to my knowledge, any mention of such a performance in any of the sources. My sense is that the prose texts circulated largely in the classroom, for consumption by students and teachers who would have been conversant with the new “technology” of the chronicle form. 4. The obvious exception is the letter of Ovadiah b. Makir, which is theologically motivated. 5. Orl´eans letter, Neubauer and Stern, p. 34; Habermann, 1945a, pp. 143– 44; 1970, p. 31. 6. Einbinder, 1998. 7. See the doctoral dissertation of Jonathan Cohen, and particularly chapter 6, “Debts Created Orally, the Annulment of Fraudulent Acts, Retaliatory Justice and Restitution,” pp. 225–62. I thank Dr. Cohen for making his work available and for his elaboration of his findings in conversation. 8. Spiegel, 1953, pp. 273–76. For more specific information on Alix, see Labande. According to Ferrante, Alix was the patroness of Gautier d’Arras; see Ferrante, 1997, pp. 124–25. 9. Dembowski; Childress; Hurley; Hume; Crane. See also the useful overview of Lifshitz, and Einbinder, 2001.

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10. Einbinder, 1998. 11. The Orl´eans letter appears in Habermann, 1945a, p. 143. 12. David Berger, 1986, p. 578. 13. Ibid., p. 579. 14. Simha Goldin, 1996a. 15. By inference, the scene of mob brutality also poses an indirect criticism of Thibaut, who is unable to control the crowd. The letter from Orl´eans includes a description of Thibaut’s displeasure with the behavior of those who attacked “with staves and clubs [perhaps lances] those who had come out of the fire and who were killed.” Habermann, 1945a, p. 144. 16. Peter Brown, 1983, p. 16. 17. On the use of the Tosafist network as a vehicle for communication, see Simha Goldin, 1996a. 18. For the Hebrew text, see Bernfeld, 1: 230–36; a full and annotated English translation appears in my chapter on the Blois martyrs in Head, 2000b, pp. 547–51. 19. For the poem, see Schirmann, 1939, pp. 36–37, and my annotated translation in Head, ed., 2000b, pp. 554–55. 20. See Urbach, 1955, pp. 124–26; Grossman, 1997, p. 82. Urbach describes Yom Tov as a “prolific poet,” but refers to only two poems. 21. Yom Tov’s teacher, Rabbenu Tam of Troyes, was also interested in the verse styles of the Andalusian rabbis, as attested by an exchange of verses between him and Abraham ibn Ezra, the famed Spanish exegete and poet; see Urbach, 1955, p. 94. A serious study of the impact of Spanish metrics and styles on the northern French Jewish poets has yet to appear. See the brief mentions by Fleischer, 1975, pp. 430–38, 443, 470; reiterated in Fleischer, 1984, pp. 614– 17. Grossman relies on Fleischer for his mention of the phenomenon, see Grossman, 1995, pp. 561–86. Fleischer, 1984, p. 668, n. 29, has observed that the poets of Ashkenaz did not show great enthusiasm for the strophic, ezor-like genres; this distaste clearly did not extend to Tosafist poetry, which contains a number of pieces written in Spanish style. See also R. Tam’s liturgical poem for Sukkot, “Yegoni umar hiki,” ខ in the Maខhzor Vitry, ed. Simon haLevi Horovitz (Berlin, 1894), appended anthology of piyyutim, no. 74, pp. 45–46. The poem is written in quantitative meter and in the strophic muwashshaខh (shir ezor) form popular in Andalusia. 22. See Dobson, 1974, pp. 22–24, for a full list of the Christian sources. The reference here is to William of Newburgh, p. 322. The most contemporary Jewish source is Ephraim of Bonn, Sefer Zekhirah, p. 35 or again in Habermann, 1945a, p. 126. 23. Ephraim of Bonn, ibid. 24. For the texts of both poems, see Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 1: 137–48 (nos. 69 and 70). 25. Weinberger. 26. Habermann, 1945a, p. 142. All translations are mine unless specifically contraindicated. 27. Compare Dan. 3:26. 28. Habermann, 1945a, p. 143.

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29. Ibid., p. 144. 30. Compare the expression in Ezek. 20:25. I am citing here, and below, from my own translation, in Head, 2000b, p. 545. As scholars have noted, Ephraim accurately describes the ordeal but “reads” it backward, assuming that the servant’s sinking is a sign of guilt and not innocence (which the Christians then override). Jews were, of course, exempt from the ordeal, which may explain Ephraim’s confusion. See Bartlett; Eidelberg; Hyams, 1981. 31. David Berger, 1986, p. 588. The text is Guibert’s Tractatus de Incarnatione contra Judaeos, PL 156:528. Berger adds, “The miracle here is not especially miraculous and the story could be true.” To the Christian, it seems to me, it was miraculous enough. 32. David Wachtel has argued convincingly that the original text of the Orl´eans letter contained all of the information known to Ephraim. See Wachtel. My thanks to the author for having made a copy of this work available. 33. Ephraim of Bonn, Sefer Zekhirah; my translation in Head, 2000b, p. 546. 34. Vauchez, 1997, p. 427. Vauchez further comments, “[I]t would be wrong to see this as a feature of popular superstition. The most cultivated regulars shared the same conviction.” See also Head, 2000a. 35. Daniel Boyarin mentions this belief in Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, pp. 197–212, and see especially p. 209. For the Christian analogue, see Bynum, 1995, pp. 220–25. As Bynum comments, “The saints do not decay, in life or in death” (220), and she characterizes tales of this phenomenon as especially “prominent” in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (221). For a general discussion of some of the ramifications of differences in body-spirit perceptions and their political, social, and theological implications, see Abulafia, 1996. 36. In the martyrological texts, the motif is documented as early as the prose chronicles of the First Crusade, in a claim that the bodies of the Mainz martyrs did not decompose. See Solomon bar Samson, in Habermann, 1945a, p. 39. The entire chronicle is translated in Chazan, 1987, pp. 243–97; for this passage, see p. 267. 37. For Jeanne d’Arc, see Regine Pernoud; for the delightful study of Luther’s unburnable portraits, see Scribner. 38. In Jewish tradition, these three companions of Daniel are identified by their Hebrew names, in Christian tradition usually as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, see Dan. 1:7. Notice also Rashi on Dan. 3:27: “the fire did not have any power over their bodies . . . the hair on their head was not scorched . . . [and] their appearance was unchanged.” 39. See, for instance, the discussion in B. Sanhedrin 52a, B. Shabbat 103b, B. Pesahim 75a. 40. The passage in B. Sanhedrin 52a, repeated in Leviticus Rabbah par. 20, s. 10, is typical; there Nadab and Abihu are described as eager for the deaths of Moses and Aaron so that leadership of the people will pass to them. The discussion in Leviticus Rabbah goes on to suggest, variously, that the brothers had been quarreling, that they had not guided each other, that they had been drinking, or improperly clothed, or had neglected to wash their hands and feet before entering the Tabernacle, or had never married and had children. Alternatively, their arro-

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gance led them to desire ‘agunot, women whose husbands were missing but who had not yet been declared widows. See Leviticus Rabbah, par. 20, s.1, 6, 8, 9, and 10. Rashi, citing the Pirqei derabbi Eliezer, repeats some of the same charges. The counter-reading appears in the same general discussion, and claims that the deaths of a righteous Nadab and Abihu were intended to atone for communal sins. See Leviticus Rabbah, par. 20, s.12. 41. Hillel of Bonn, “Emunei shelumei yisrael,” vv. 25–28, in Bernfeld, 1: 230– 36. All subsequent excerpts will be indicated by verse number only. 42. Mekhilta, Bahodesh, ខ par. 3 (ed. Jacob Lautenberg, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976, p. 211): Harei atem qeshurim tefusin ve’anuvim; mahខ ar bo’u veqablu ‘aleikhem et kol hamitzvot [Behold you are tied and caught and bound; tomorrow, come and receive all the commandments]. 43. Dan. 3:20–21; Gen. Rabbah 1 (where Isaac begs Abraham to “kafteini”); Mishnah Makkot 3:12. For the additional image of a man in stocks, often in order to extract his payment or confession, see Y. Gittin 1, end, 43d; Y. Kidd. 3, 64a; B. Gittin 14a. 44. Or, according to a variant reading: “This sacrifice is a support and strength.” (;eu,u lnx in Bernfeld, 1:233, versus ;fu,u lnux in Habermann, 1945a, p. 139). The general meaning is unchanged. 45. The Troyes letter, for instance, supposedly written with the authority of R. Tam, calls for restrictions on wedding festivities, a three-year ban on the wearing of silk, and a period of twice-weekly fasting. See Habermann, 1945a, p. 146. See also Wachtel, who claims the regulations were never implemented. 46. The Orl´eans letter, in Habermann, 1945a, p. 142. 47. The Troyes letter, in ibid., p. 146. 48. Wachtel. 49. When God forgives his people again, then “the light of Israel will become a fire and his Holy One a flame, and it will burn and devour his thorns and briers”—that is, in Rashi’s paraphrase of the Targum, the “lords and mighty men” who have oppressed them. 50. Soloveitchik, 1998. 51. The motif of the martyr’s speech is a fascinating one that has been explored for the Christian sources but not for the Jewish. Medieval Christian martyrology may have preferred the motif of the martyr’s speech before execution— although, in a different miraculous figure, sometimes after the amputation of the martyr’s tongue. See Cynthia Hahn, esp. p. 178. Although a much later source, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs offers a number of death scenes in which the dying martyrs call out from the flames as they burn. The convention suggests both that people did often say something while burning and that the iconic gesture of this fiery speech came to constitute a martyrological gesture. See Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. From the Jewish sources, a Troyes martyr, Hayyim of Chaource, is also depicted in a late thirteenth-century lament as calling out while burning; see Einbinder, 1999. 52. In this verse from Ezekiel, God compares Israel to a vine, good only for kindling because it is quickly and utterly consumed. 53. David Wachtel’s argument for the nonobservance of such a fastday is convincing. Again, I am talking about designated, not actual, use. In this context, it is intriguing that the first or third days of the Jewish month of Sivan were days of

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commemorative fasting for the martyrs of 1096 in Ashkenaz communities. The sixth of Sivan is Shavuot. See Wachtel, esp. pp. 9–14. 54. Leviticus Rabbah, par. 32, s.1. The passage is repeated almost verbatim in the Mekhilta, where it appears in a discussion of the first three commandments, see Mekhilta Yitro, Bahodesh, ខ s. 6. 55. Canticles Rabbah par. 2, 1(v). The reading relies on the similarity between ashishot (dried fruit) and esh (fire—and in Aramaic, ashata). 56. See the expressions in verses 21 (gibborei koaខh), 26 (rabbei qahal), 27 (tofsei hខ ayyim), 33 (ខhever kohanim), 42 (tofsei ha-torah) or 65 (shokhvei shefatayyim). 57. It is nonetheless a scenario confirmed in the tale of R. Amnon of Mainz, a legendary figure whose story is attributed to Ephraim of Bonn; for the source, see R. Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, Or Zaru’a, Hilkhot Rosh Hashanah, s. 276 (Zitomir, 1862), p. 63a. For an insightful analysis, see Ivan Marcus, 1993, or the slightly revised French version in Marcus, 1994. See also the sources and historical evidence discussed in the first chapter. For further reading on the three Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade, see Chazan, 1987 and 1991; Ivan Marcus, 1982; Yuval; and Jeremy Cohen, 1994. 58. For the text of Bekhor Shor’s lament, see Goldschmidt and Fraenkel 1: 263–65, no. 125. The poem is not included among the collected piyyutim of Bekhor Shor published by Habermann and may not have been known to him at that time; see Joseph (Bekhor Shor) of Orl´eans, 1938. For background on Bekhor Shor himself, see Urbach, 1955, pp. 113–20; Grossman, 1997, pp. 302– 305, 318–20, and 489–92; and Blake. Joseph’s commentary on the Pentateuch has recently appeared in a new critical edition by Yehoshafat Nebo. The only study of his surviving poems, four selihot ខ and one ‘aqqedah, is Habermann’s 1938 edition with introduction. According to Urbach, one poem in manuscript existed in addition to the five poems published by Habermann, and this may be the Blois lament in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel. 59. Bekhor Shor’s exegetical works clarify his position on this point. For a discussion with respect to the Patriarchal narratives, see Blake, n. 58. See also the relevant passages in Urbach, 1955; Poznanski; Walter (introd.); and Signer, 1993. 60. The Hebrew text was published by Habermann; see Baruch of Magenza, pp. 133–40; a partial translation (of sixteen lines from four nonconsecutive stanzas) appears in Carmi, p. 386. 61. Bernfeld, 1: 225–30; Ephraim of Bonn,1968, pp. 54–58; Habermann, 1945a, pp. 133–36; Berliner, pp. 9–11. See also Carmi, pp. 384–86, for a partial translation of “Lemi oy lemi avoy.” My own annotated translation of the full text appears in Head, 2000b. 62. Note, for instance, the expressions “hiខzdiqu et ha-rasha’ vehirshi’u et ha-ខzadiq,” “velo ho’il hon beyom ‘evrah,” and “ulai yamiru et kevodam belo yo’il.” See Deut. 25:1, Prov. 11:4, and Jer. 2:11, respectively. All three phrases find their way in to the Sefer Zekhirah. 63. See the discussion of this poem in chapter 5. ខ 64. For Meir of Rothenburg, see Samson bar Zadoq, s. 415; the sermons of Aboab and Morteira appear in Saperstein; see pp. 300, 325, and 390 for the English, and pp. 358 and 404 for the Hebrew. On the Megillat Amrafel, see Scholem; and Baer, pp. 430–32.

THREE BURNING JEWISH BOOKS They who have been slain by the sword are better off than those who dwell desolate without Torah. —Vikuaខh Rabbenu Yeខhiel, 12

O

N A FRIDAY in June of 1242, a young Jewish student in Paris watched the Talmud burn. Meir ben Baruch had recently come to Paris, probably from Mainz, to study with R. Yehiel. In Mainz he had studied with R. Judah b. Solomon haCohen, a rabbinical scholar and authority who was also related to Meir’s family.1 Since R. Judah himself had studied with R. Yehiel, it is not surprising that his young kinsman should have come to the prestigious Parisian school, where he, too, could master the dialectical methods that had earned the northern French rabbis and their academies such fame.2 As we have seen, the Tosafist schools had achieved renown before Meir was born, in the days of Rabbi Jacob b. Meir (“Rabbenu Tam,” d. 1171). Upon finishing their studies, the new graduates of the Tosafist schools returned to their homes or migrated to other towns in northern France, England, and Germany, where they established their own schools and educated their own students. Rather like a well-organized alumni group today, they stayed in touch with each other and with their teachers.3 (In chapter 2, we saw an example of how swiftly this network could be mobilized in the series of letters written following the burning of thirty-two Jews in Blois in 1171.) Their mutual interests were not merely academic. The Tosafists were the religious authorities whose rulings were responsible for much of the character of northern European Jewish life in this period. Following the Jews’ return to royal France in 1198, and under the reigns of Philip II Augustus, Louis VIII, and Louis IX, successive persecutions and policies of harassment took a brutal toll on oncethriving communities, shattering the self-confidence of learned and common Jews alike.4 The Tosafist poetry of martyrdom responded to these conditions, crafting images of transcendence in suffering while reflecting the ideological battleground on which Jews and Christians met. Martyrological poems that commemorated the victims of anti-Jewish violence were designed to present a model of resistance and fortitude in the face of persecution. But we have seen that these poems were not just

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therapeutic responses to terror and loss; they were also polemical vehicles, embodying in the figures of the martyrs behaviors and beliefs that reinforced Jewish identity while expressing revulsion for Christian symbols and faith. Because they were recited in the synagogue, these piyyutim were heard by everyone present—and surely on the fast and holy days when they were recited (like the Ninth of Av, the fast of Gedaliah, or Yom Kippur), the synagogue was full. Hearing and comprehension are, however, entirely different matters. Very few women knew Hebrew, and we may assume that the poets wrote chiefly for men. But men, too, would have had variable access to this difficult and densely allusive poetry. Most Jewish males were literate, but the focus of Tosafist education was intensive talmudic study, the privileged activity of a small elite.5 The martyrological laments accordingly demonstrated sensitivity to a range of listeners. The basic images in the poems—images of bravery, consolation, contempt, and revenge—would have reverberated clearly to all. At the same time, the listeners most likely to decode the mosaic of biblical and rabbinic allusions that constituted the verses were arguably the students themselves, who could take pleasure in cracking the puzzles of the texts as they absorbed their message. This chapter concentrates on a poem written by one such student—Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg, whose lament for the Talmud gives us some idea how he and his comrades heard the message their teachers tried to convey. I have suggested already that the Tosafists may have been especially concerned with reaffirming the identity of their disciples, a concern we may understand better by considering the circumstances of these privileged young men. The physical and psychological pressures on French Jews took a particular toll on the elite scholars among them. For reasons scholars debate, the tone in Jewish intellectual life in France changed noticeably in the thirteenth century, and a generation of scholars honored for innovative and sometimes daring interpretations of traditional texts gave way to a generation of consolidators.6 By the thirteenth century the days of glory for the Tosafists were over, and the double impact of persecution and attrition confronted the rabbis and the communities they led. Indeed, the holy martyrs killed by mob violence or judicial execution included many scholars of greater or lesser prominence. Both as potential converts and as exemplary victims, they may have been primary targets, as suggested by the legend of R. Amnon of Mainz.7 Yom Tov of Joigny, a poet and scholar whose lament for the Blois victims of 1171 was discussed in chapter 2, was a martyr of the York massacre in 1190. Elhanan, the son of R. Isaac of Dampi`ere (the “Ri”) was killed in 1184, midway through a commentary on a talmudic tractate.8 Uri b. Joel HaLevi, one of a family of known scholars and poets, was burned in 1216 in Cologne. Toward the end of the century, martyrdom also awaited Mordecai b.

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Hillel, the loyal student of Meir of Rothenburg, who would visit Meir in prison and record his legal opinions.9 Death, however, was only one tragedy that could befall the scholarrabbi. Conversion was also an option, and in the early thirteenth century, as the pressure on northern French Jews increased, so did the number of Jews who converted.10 Jews who accepted conversion at sword-point, in terror for their lives, were one sort of problem, which has been amply discussed.11 But not all Jews did convert at sword-point, and it was a terrible blow when a combination of Christian argument and Jewish misery convinced educated young men to abandon their faith. The defection of the Jewish elite was a twofold disaster, both as a loss to the family and community of the apostate and as a weapon in the hands of his new co-religionists, as seen in the Jewish account of a disputation staged in Narbonne, shortly after 1240. According to this account, the archbishop asked his Jewish disputant, Meir b. Simon, to explain how he could resist the obvious rightness of Christianity when so many learned and prominent Jews were abandoning Jewish error for the truth. He, too, should join the “intelligentsia” and “throw away the husk to eat the pomegranate.”12 Young, educated Jews seem to have been at high risk. Through business and intellectual contacts, they were constantly exposed to Christian society and its temptations, and the turbulent emotions and frustration we associate now with “adolescence” may have made humiliation harder to bear.13 Furthermore, zealous converts who interpreted (and translated) Jewish texts to the Church were a serious problem. Nicholas Donin, whose letter to Pope Gregory IX in 1239 first accused the Talmud of blasphemy, was such a figure, and there were others as well.14 As I have suggested in the preceding chapters, it made sense in these circumstances for the poetry of martyrdom to address its keenest audience—young Jewish men—in ways designed to reinforce their adherence to Judaism. It is no accident that the ideal martyr of Tosafist poetry reflected the aspirations of this audience: to possess learning, wealth, and good family, and be prepared to forfeit them for God. At the same time, the martyr reviled Christianity in graphic, even vulgar terms, which must have made a strong impression on adolescent minds.15 Conversion to Christianity would peak in the midcentury; a few decades earlier, perhaps, the magnitude of the crisis could not be foreseen.16 Nor could the fact that it would peak. For us, therefore, young Meir in Paris provides an opportunity. He represents the group of students to whom the martyrological ideal and its anti-Christian polemic appealed in special ways. Even better, he gives us an idea of how he and his fellow students heard their teachers, because when he saw the Talmud burning, Meir wrote a poem. “Sha’ali serufah ba-esh” has been treated as an in-

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spired literary invention, a unique instance of a martyrlogical lament whose martyrs are books. Certainly the mythic quality of Meir’s own life, his later fame as a scholar and his tragic end predisposed scholars to see his Talmud lament as yet another tribute to an exceptional mind. Yet however brilliant he was, the Meir of 1242 was still a young man with his fame and misfortune before him. Moreover, even a genius rarely invents something out of nothing. It is important, therefore, to try to situate Meir’s lament in a larger historical and literary context. Where did he get the idea to write a lament for burning books, and what can his poem’s originality or conventionality tell us? Can we use Meir’s poem to construct a fuller picture of Jewish life in the early thirteenth century? Not much is known about martyrological trends in Jewish writing from northern France in the early thirteenth century, as relatively few Hebrew martyrological poems from this region and period survive. Some historians have speculated that the writing of liturgical poetry ceased in Tosafist circles during this period.17 This does not seem to be the case, however. It is true that the dearth of French martyrological poetry from the thirteenth century stands in marked contrast to the situation in Germany, where a number of laments survive, many of them referring to well-known incidents (such as Erfurt in 1221, Fulda 1235, Lauda 1235, Frankfurt 1241).18 Extant French laments include a poem by Solomon b. Joseph believed to describe martyrs in Anjou (in 1236 or 1251), a number of penitential hymns by Tuvia of Vienne, and persecution laments by Moses b. Isaac, David b. Samson, and Moses bar Natan, which may actually commemorate events later in the century.19 For the second half of the century, almost the only poems that correspond to an identifiable incident are five laments (one in Old French) for thirteen martyrs burned in Troyes in 1288.20 Even a fragmentary corpus demonstrates that Meir’s poem is not unique; at least one other lament, long forgotten, commemorates the same event. Moreover, Meir’s poem drew on a number of available literary traditions. These include Judah Halevi’s famous lament to Zion and its subsequent imitations, vernacular Christian poems to a female Beloved (particularly the Virgin), and earlier Jewish descriptions of sacred texts. Finally, while the idea of burning books seems to have come from their Christian neighbors, angry factionalism within the Jewish world sometimes led Jews to burn books by other Jews.21 These controversies—epitomized by the furor over books by Maimonides—were sometimes documented in verse. So let me start with Meir and try to reconstruct some of the cultural and literary characteristics of the world in which he wrote. Meir was born in Worms, probably around 1220–23, as he was studying Talmud with R. Isaac Or Zarua’ in Wurzburg in 1235.22 From Wurzburg, he went to Mainz, to study with R. Judah haCohen, who sent

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him on to Paris to study with the great Tosafist teachers there. Meir later refers to his Parisian studies under the tutelage of R. Yehiel (the head of the Paris academy), R. Samuel ben Salomon of Falaise, R. Ezra of Moncontour, and R. Samuel of Evreux.23 Thus Meir b. Baruch was in all likelihood about twenty years of age when the burning of the Talmud took place.24 Whether or not he was present for the “trial” of the Talmud and his teacher’s role in its defense, he seems to have been an eyewitness to the outcome of the hearings. The Church’s interest in the Talmud was a recent development. When the apostate Nicholas Donin presented his charges against the Talmud to Gregory IX in 1239, “it seemed to have been news to the Pope” that the Jews relied on an extrascriptural book that contained blasphemies against Jesus and Mary as well as numerous other “errors” of belief.25 This lack of earlier interest also characterized the monarchy, which until the end of the 1230s chiefly viewed its Jews as a source of potential income.26 Albeit novel, the official concern of both Louis IX and ecclesiastical leaders had grave consequences for French Jews. Donin provided Gregory IX with a list of thirty-five charges against the Talmud. According to these charges, the Talmud contained numerous blasphemies against God, Jesus, Mary, and Christianity. It was full of insulting and incredible fables, some of which portrayed God manipulated by the rabbis. Moreover, it represented a perversion of the sense of the Bible until those who followed its dictates could no longer be considered “Jews,” that is, the surviving remnant of biblical Israel, which, since Augustine, Christianity had held itself obligated to preserve as a witness in its midst.27 Gregory IX’s letter to the monarchs of France, England, Aragon, Navarre, Castile, Leon, and Portugal aroused enthusiasm only in royal France.28 There Louis IX impounded Jewish books in a surprise Sabbath raid in the spring of 1240. A team of rabbis, headed by R. Yehiel of Paris (Meir’s teacher), was summoned hastily to defend the Talmud in a series of sessions held before an audience including King Louis IX, the Queen Mother (Blanche of Castile), and Queen Margaret. They were confronted by Nicholas Donin and a delegation of leading churchmen including Eudes of Chateauroux, chancellor of the University of Paris; Walter the archbishop of Sens; William of Auvergne, the bishop of Paris; Geoffrey of Bellevelle, chaplain to the King; and Adam of Chambly, the bishop of Senlis.29 Technically neither a judicial trial nor an inquisitorial process, the “trial” that ensued was “sui generis, something new, but a possible precedent for the future.”30 The extant Hebrew and Latin versions of the proceedings are largely in agreement (although the extravagant impunity of R. Yehiel’s remarks in the Hebrew account must have been a later, polemical addition).31 Unsurprisingly, despite the efforts of R. Yehiel and his

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cohorts, the Talmud was condemned as a book containing heretical and blasphemous material, insulting to Christianity and a deviation from biblical “Judaism.” For two years, the rabbis managed to stave off the evil decree, but the forces arrayed against them were inexorable. In June of 1242, the Sixth of Tammuz by the Jewish calendar, the Talmud was burned. Historians repeat (somewhat helplessly, as the report and its quantitative implications remain uncertain) the late thirteenth-century account of R. Zedekiah bar Abraham, which describes “some twenty-four wagons full of Talmuds, legal and aggadic texts” brought to be burned that June.32 Over the next century, the official condemnation was reaffirmed, sometimes with burning, in 1247, 1248, 1254, 1284, 1290, 1299, 1319, and 1321.33 It was not hard to foresee the consequences. The attack on the “Talmud” was a blow to the heart of Tosafist education. Meir b. Baruch, like many Jewish students before him, had been taught that the Talmud was a sacred corpus of “Oral” Law, revealed to Moses along with the Written Law at Sinai. It was this combination of “Written” and “Oral” Law that constituted the sacred Jewish teachings of “Torah.” Far from constituting a deviation from their ancient Law, the Talmud was essential, as R. Yehiel and his colleagues argued before the Crown, if Jews were to understand that Law at all.34 Without it, Jewish life could not survive. The burning of the Talmud was thus no less than a burning of the Law itself, a tragedy of unspeakable proportions even in the light of the human losses of those years. By 1247, Meir would be back in Germany, settling in Rothenburg until his father’s death in 1276 or 1281, when he returned to Worms.35 In 1286, he was arrested in Lombardy, where he had stopped with his daughters and son-in-law en route to the Holy Land. Such emigration was illegal, as indeed was any migration of Jews under the dominion of one lord to the territory of another.36 Remanded to the custody of Rudolf I, the Hapsburg ruler, he was held in custody in Ensisheim and Wasserburg until his death in 1293. Even then, it would be another seven years before the Christian authorities turned over his body for Jewish burial.37 The poem “Sha’ali serufah ba-esh” (Ask, O you who are burned in fire) undoubtedly owes some of its popularity to its model, HaLevi’s faA mous lament for Zion, “Zion ha-lo tishali.” HaLevi’s poem addressed a personified (feminine) Zion, for whom the speaker longs and whom he implores to attend to her yearning supplicants, whose devotion to her has not flagged through their years of suffering in exile. In a number of ways, Meir evokes HaLevi’s poem, formally by adhering to HaLevi’s metrical and rhyme schemes, internally in linguistic echoes, and thematically in the poem’s poignant address to a feminized “Torah” whose devotees an-

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guish over her and their fates. The poems are identical in length and meter—a quantitative meter common in Sephardic poetry but far rarer among the poets of northern France and Ashkenaz.38 They also share their rhyme, a single rhyme that is sustained throughout both poems. That rhyme—ayikh, the feminine pronomial suffix “your”—reverberates longingly, evoking the Book of Lamentations as well as a feminine subject. The poem in translation follows:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Meir of Rothenburg, “Sha’ali serufah ba-esh” (Ask, O You Who Are Burned in Fire) O You who are burned in fire, ask how your mourners fare40 They who yearn to dwell in the court of your dwelling place They who gasp in the dust of the earth and who feel pain41 They who are stunned by the blaze of your parchment. They who walk in the dark with no light, but hope for the light42 Of day to shine forth over them and you. How fare the people sighing and weeping and brokenhearted, Continually lamenting your birth pains?43 They mourn like jackals and ostriches And call for bitter wailing on your behalf. How could she who was given by the flaming God be consumed by the fire44 Of mortals, while the foes were not scorched by your embers?45 (And you, how long will you dwell in tranquillity, O dainty foe?46 Have not your thorns covered my flowers?47 You sit proudly to judge God’s children with all Judgments and bring them to trial. Moreover, you decree burning for the law and regulations given in fire— Happy the one who requites you!)48 Did my Rock [appear] in flame and fire to give you49 Later to another fire to blaze at your hems? O Sinai, was this why the Lord chose you, disdaining Greater mountains to shine within your borders? To be a sign of the Law when her glory would dwindle And go down? Let me make an analogy: You are like a king who wept at his son’s feast-day Foreseeing his death—so your speech foretold your end.50 O Sinai, instead of your cloak, let your garment be a sack Don the garb of widows instead of your dresses. I will pour forth tears until like a river they reach

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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Unto the tombs of your most noble princes, Moses and Aaron, on Mount Hor, and I will ask: Is there A new Torah, that your scrolls may be burned? Born on the third month, and the fourth was arranged for Destroying your grace and the beauty of your crown.51 For [the foe] has cut down the Tablets, then doubled his folly52 By burning the Law in fire—are these your twofold damages?53 I wonder to myself: How can food taste sweet After seeing how they gathered your plunder55 As though it belonged to an idolatrous city. And those whom you rejected from your congregation Burned the Almighty’s prize possession in the square.55 I do not know how to find the way to you Your ways, the path of righteousness, are mourning.56 A drink mixed with tears would taste sweeter than honey And to take on your chains would be sweet to my feet! It would soothe my eyes to draw forth tears until There were no more, for those who cling to the hem of your cloak. But they burn dry as they go down my cheeks, for I am so moved by the wandering of your Master. He took his wealth and went far away And with him your protection fled.57 And I remained behind alone, like one bereft and solitary,58 Like the mast at the top of your tower.59 No more will I hear the voice of men and women singing For the cords of your pipes [?] have been severed.60 I will dress and cover myself in sackcloth, for very dear to me Were the souls of your slain ones, who have multiplied and grown like the sand.61 I wonder greatly at the light of day, which shines On all, but brings darkness to you and me. Cry aloud bitterly for your destruction and for your62 Anguish—if only He would recall the love of your wedding day!63 Gird on sackcloth for the conflagration that Was kindled to divide you and decimate your hilltops!64 The Rock will console you in compensation for your suffering, He will restore from captivity65 The tribes of Jeshurun, and raise you up from degradation.66 Once again you will wear a crimson ornament, and take up your timbrel67 And go forth in dance, singing for joy in your dances

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67. My heart will be lifted up when I see the Rock shed light upon you 68. Bringing light into your darkness and illuminating your shadows.68 At least a half-dozen times, Meir alludes to HaLevi’s poem, emphasizing verses in its second half describing Jewish suffering in exile. The evocations can be poignant, as when HaLevi’s speaker longs to traverse the Holy Land, and to be “stunned” with awe at the tombs of his ancestors in Hebron and at the Mount beyond Jordan, while Meir’s speaker is “stunned” by the blaze of parchment afire.69 Both poets cry that it is impossible to eat or drink while their grief is so great—one because Israel is in the hands of her enemies, “dogs” who drag the “young lions” away (HaLevi, v. 39), and the other because “the plunderers” have “burned the Almighty’s prize possession in the street” (Meir, v. 40). In both poems, the speakers plead for the faithful remnant “who clings to your cloak,” respectively Zion’s and Torah’s (HaLevi, v. 55, and Meir, v. 46). Meir boldly raises the theological question with which learned Christian clerics and common folk alike repeatedly plied the Jews: Did not their new Law supersede the old? He writes: I will pour forth tears until like a river they reach Unto the tombs of your most noble princes, Moses and Aaron on Mount Hor, and I will ask: Is there A new Torah, that your scrolls may be burned? (vv. 29–32) Were not Jewish abjection and degradation a sure sign that the old covenant of God and Israel had been abrogated? From the perspective of the Christian disputants at the Talmud trial, this was true in part because the Jews had corrupted biblical truth with their Oral Law. To Jews like the young R. Meir, however, there was no difference between biblical (Written) and talmudic (Oral) Law; both had been revealed at Sinai. As Meir laments, by “cutting down” the Tablets and then burning the Talmud, the Christians responded with double folly to the twofold nature of the Law (vv. 35–36). Perhaps the most striking feature of his Talmud lament is that it is framed as an address to a female figure. Had Meir composed a lament merely to “Talmud,” which is a masculine noun, he could not have employed this device. But by turning to a personification of “Torah,” which is feminine, he emphasized the identity of “Torah” and “Talmud,” while evoking longingly the feminine figure of his lament, a combination of Mothers Zion and Rachel. Where did Meir get this idea? A Long before Meir composed his lament, HaLevi’s “Zion ha-lo tishali”

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had given birth to a genre of “Zion” poems, many still found in the liturgy for the Ninth of Av. Five examples written before 1240, following Halevi’s model, all address a feminine personification of “Zion.”70 Indeed, one original feature of Meir’s lament is that it is addressed to a female figure who is not Zion. It seems likely that part of the appeal of these poems to medieval listeners lay in their use of a feminine persona. And why not? A thriving vernacular tradition of courtly lyrics written by Christian poets for female figures must have shaped the aesthetic expectations and emotional sensibilities of Jewish listeners as well.71 Some of the vernacular poems were dedicated to real (if idealized) women, and some to the female figure most sacred to Christian believers, the Virgin Mary.72 Meir would have been able to understand these lyrics, even though he had spent his childhood years in German-speaking territory, because the French vernacular was familiar to Rhenish Jews.73 Undoubtedly, the new musical styles emerging in Paris at this time must have found Jewish listeners as well. The use of polyphony, in particular, and the rise of the motet, were associated with the university schools—many of them located in the same urban centers where Tosafist learning flourished, and performed in public as well as liturgical settings.74 In another type of vernacular lyric, the crusade lyric (sirventes), images of sacred and secular women also figured frequently, sometimes in opposition. For instance, Thibaut of Champagne, a contemporary of Meir’s, wrote a number of crusade lyrics. The speaker in Thibaut’s crusade songs is torn between his desire for a beloved woman and his desire to serve God, for whom he must travel to distant lands: Bien doit mes cuers estre liez et dolanz: dolanz de ce que je part de ma dame, et liez de ce que je sui desirranz de servir Dieu, qui est mes cuers et m’ame. Iceste amor est trop fine et puissanz. [It is fitting that my heart be joyous and doleful: Doleful for leaving my lady, And joyous, desirous Of serving God, who is my heart and my soul. This love is surpassingly true and powerful.] In mingled devotion and despair, the crusader turns to the Virgin, who becomes a substitute for the woman he leaves behind: Dame des ciez, granz roine puissanz, au grant besoing me soiez secoranz! De vos amer puisse avoir droite flamme, quant dame pert, par dame me soit aidanz!

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[Lady of the heavens, great, powerful queen, Greatly am I in need of succour! May I be inflamed with love for you! When I lose a lady, by a lady may I be helped!75 Meir’s decision to compose his lament as an avowal of fealty and love to the lady “Torah” is an intrinsic part of his polemic. In this context, we should remember that Meir was writing at the height of Christian fervor (especially in northern France) for the cult of the Virgin, and that one of the charges against the Talmud was that it contained insults to Mary.76 As scholars have noted, the Talmud and medieval Jewish polemical literature contain any number of slurs against Mary as well as Jesus. However, the situation differs with respect to liturgical poetry. While contempt for Jesus is common in martyrological and penitential poetry, Mary is never mentioned at all. The rabbi-poets may have felt that attention to a female figure—any female figure, for they pay short shrift to female martyrs as well—was not in keeping with the terms of the genre. Yet if I am right, Meir’s poem constitutes, among other things, a polemical response to Marian devotion, offering his listeners a Jewish counterpart to the Virgin.77 Thus, from an unlikely source, we gain some sense of how the model of feudal, romantic love had made inroads into the Jews’ spiritual world. In the hands of a young poet, it achieved an ardor and lyricism otherwise absent in medieval Hebrew verse from Christian Europe. Meir’s delicate allusions to Mother Rachel add pathos to the more abstract female figure of “Torah.” Invoking Jeremiah’s depiction of Rachel weeping for her children (Jer. 31), Meir proclaims that his lady’s suffering will not last forever: Once again you will wear a crimson ornament, and take up your timbrel And go forth in dance, singing for joy in your dances (vv. 65–66) His listeners know he refers to the promise of Jer. 31:3: I will yet rebuild you and you will be rebuilt, O Maid of Israel. Once more you will take up your timbrel and go forth in dance. (Jer. 31:3) It is no wonder if scholars and readers have thought Meir’s poem unique. In a sense, it is, just as any great poem is, but it remains the case that the idea of writing a lament for the burned Talmuds was not merely his own. A sixteenth-century maខhzor (high holy day prayerbook) from Salonika preserves a number of penitential poems from medieval northern

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Europe. One of these, written by a poet named Solomon, also mourns the burning of the Sixth of Tammuz.78 The text is a bit tangled and the poem itself is not very good, but for our purposes it is important. Because it has gone virtually unnoticed, I provide a translation in entirety:79 Solomon (b. Joseph?) “Shemesh veyarea h” ខ (O Sun and Moon) 1. O sun and moon and stars of heaven, cry out and wail without rest80 2. Like ostriches, forever, not for a day or two. Make mourning, eulogies, and laments81 3. For all knees turn to water,82 4. My heart is broken and I am powerless— 83 5. For the Holy Torah on the Sixth of Tammuz; let all the house of Israel weep for Tammuz.84 6. Because of this, there will be no sun to light their days. The laws of heaven and earth have been violated.85 7. They existed because of the covenant, but surely God’s enemies have razed their foundations.86 8. For those who hear [sighs] before their bread87 9. May a Redeemer come— 10. For the Holy Torah on the Sixth of Tammuz; let all the house of Israel weep for Tammuz. 11. The angels on high refuse to be comforted, but weep bitterly and cry without88 12. With all the heavenly host. Men tear their clothing and are sick of life89 13. They have removed their clothing to go naked90 14. And barefooted. None seeks to know how his neighbor fares or asks91 15. For the Holy Torah on the Sixth of Tammuz; let all the house of Israel weep for Tammuz. 16. Woe, let us raise our voices in the streets, for the Light of Life has been taken away and gone up to heaven.92 17. Remember how our enemies despised Your Name, for You are wrathful and don vengeance.93 18. Return [their evil] unto their bosom and let us see it,94 19. Lest they say in contempt that God has forgotten95 20. The Holy Torah on the Sixth of Tammuz; let all the house of Israel weep for Tammuz. Despite its obvious dissimilarities, Solomon’s poem shares a few significant characteristics with Meir’s. Both poets wrote in metrical and stan-

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zaic forms borrowed from Spanish Hebrew poetry. The rabbi-poets of northern France and the Rhineland knew of the poetic innovations and stylistic norms of Andalusian Hebrew writing by the twelfth century. Rabbenu Tam even attempted a poetic exchange with a contemporary Hebrew poet from Spain, Abraham Ibn Ezra.96 Ephraim of Regensburg, who wrote a number of scathing poetic commemorations of Second Crusade violence, also liked the Spanish style, as did thirteenth-century poets like Solomon b. Simhah ខ and Meir b. Elijah of Norwich.97 In terms of content, Solomon’s lament repeats a theme at the heart of Meir’s poem. “Torah,” for both men, is the combined repository of Written and Oral Law. Solomon’s refrain line affirms this by subsuming both under the rubric of “Torah.” Moreover, like Meir, he understands that the biblical covenant between God and Israel is mediated through rabbinic law. Without Torah, God’s blueprint for the cosmos, the celestial order is unraveled. As Solomon says, the laws of heaven and earth “existed because of the covenant, and surely God’s enemies have razed their foundations” (v. 17). Solomon calls on God to avenge them quickly, lest the Christians argue that He has abandoned the Jews and their Law. The refrain line of Solomon’s lament suggests that the poem was intended for a commemorative liturgy, likely the fast-day declared to mark the burning. It illustrates that it was not novel for a Jewish writer to have thought of adapting the conventions of lament poetry to describe the immolation of sacred books. To do so, the poets also drew on preexisting conventions for describing book desecrations. These they had in some number. So, let us turn to examine the ways Hebrew poets had described the destruction of sacred texts. How do these influence our poems? A survey of the major published collections of medieval Hebrew martyrological poetry reveals some fifteen laments that include descriptions of the desecration of sacred texts.98 The laments range from poetic accounts of First Crusade violence (1096) to the Rindfleisch massacres of 1298; one poem may be as late as 1327, although it is arguably a thirteenth-century composition.99 Three laments are from 1096, and one commemorates the martyrs of Speyer killed in the wake of crusade violence in 1196, but the majority document thirteenth-century incidents. Certain motifs recur in these poems. All but one of the laments describe incidents of mob violence that combined the destruction of Torah scrolls and sometimes other sacred texts with attacks on Jewish men, women, and children. The mobs are not specifically looking for rabbinic texts; on the contrary, they attack whatever they find in the synagogue, usually the scrolls in the ark. As there would be no reason for Christians to destroy Torah scrolls (containing the Pentateuch) for their content, it is their role as cultic objects that targets them for desecration.100

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The 1096 laments set a standard for the later poets, who described the Torah in terms of endearment, always feminine, and the horror of seeing “her” torn open and defiled, trampled and dragged through the mud. Sometimes the Torah and study-house are described as a miqdash, the biblical Temple. Sometimes she is dat-tushiah (the Law of Victory), or pe’er datkha (the Glory of Your Law), the divinely “appointed and beautiful portion” of the Jews, the “Playful One,” or the “Delightful Gift.” In three thirteenth-century poems, she is a “sanctuary,” a “tower,” and a “wall”—images that suggest a sense of siege while testifying to an assimilation of Christian hagiographical conventions exalting the intact virginity of female saints.101 Two poems describe scrolls converted to degrading use, in one case made into shoes for lepers and in another perhaps drum covers.102 One 1096 lament alludes to the midrashic legend in which Jewish children were wrapped in their books and slaughtered.103 The only lament of this group to describe a judicial execution, Mordecai bar Eleazer’s lament for the burning of Uri haLevi in Cologne (1216) depicts Uri dismembered then burned while wrapped in a scroll. In this case, the poet is clearly alluding to the Talmudic story of Hananiah (or Haninah) ben Teradion, one of the famed “Ten Martyrs” of the Hadrianic persecutions, who was burned wrapped in a Torah scroll.104 The 1096 lament by Qalonymos bar Judah echoes in many later poems, including Meir’s and Solomon’s. Qalonymos mourns the death of young girls and “the tender young boys / wrapped in their books and dragged to slaughter.” These books are not just Torah scrolls. And since this is long before any official attack on rabbinic literature, Qalonymos sees no polemical dangers in distinguishing between written and oral tradition: I saw Her torn, bereft and solitary Torah and Scripture and Mishnah and Aggadah. Answer this, and lament and tell me: Where are Torah and Talmud and those who study her?105 Qalonymos cries out “brokenly and bitterly” for the attack on the houses of worship and Jewish learning: On the day the Law was given, I was prepared to rejoice: [But] on the day She was given just so she returned She went up to heaven to Her dwelling-place With Her covering and sheath and those who study and seek Her Her students and teachers by light and dead of night.106 Qalonymos bar Judah’s lament must have enjoyed a good degree of fame among later generations. It is the only poem of all the earlier laments to mention books to which Meir and Solomon directly allude.

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Meir also played with the ironic image of a reversal of Sinai, asking “How could she who was given by divine fire be consumed by the fire / of mortals . . . ?” (vv. 11–12), and wondering if the burning books signify that the covenant is dead. [Is there] a new Torah, that your scrolls may be burned? Born on the third month, and the fourth was arranged for Destroying your grace and the beauty of your crown. (vv. 32–34) Solomon, too, echoes Qalonymos’ verses when he bewails the Torah (the “Light of Life”) that “has been taken away and gone up to heaven” (v. 16). Thus, Meir did have a precedent for some of the motifs he used in his lament for the Talmud. Qalonymos bar Judah’s poem in particular seems to have resonated deeply. Still, none of these earlier descriptions of burned books appears in a lament dedicated solely to books, and only one commemorates a scroll and martyr executed judicially and not at the hands of a mob. In this respect, the source for Meir’s inspiration did not apparently lie in earlier martyrological conventions. But there was another source of poetry about books that he would likely have known. Moreover, that poetry also described books on trial and books that were burned. I refer to the Maimunist controversy of the 1230s, which although usually discussed with respect to the abundant and vituperative correspondence left by the disputants, generated poetic commentary as well. To this we now turn. As scholars have reconstructed it, the Maimunist controversy did not originally have anything to do with the rabbis of northern France. How exactly they became embroiled in a dispute between rabbinic factions in Provence and Spain, and what part they played in the uproar that ensued have been considerably debated.107 What seems clear is that in 1230, a rabbi in Montpellier, Solomon b. Abraham, tried to enlist the support of northern French rabbis in his battle to ban the works of Maimonides. The specific works that were contested were the great philosopher’s Guide to the Perplexed and his Book of Knowledge (or Science); the former had recently been translated from Arabic into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon and was circulating in southern France.108 Solomon accused Maimonides’ works of leading Jews to apostasy by emphasizing allegorical interpretation and rational philosophy. Which French rabbis Solomon approached (perhaps through his students Jonah Gerondi and David bar Saul) and how much familiarity they actually had with Maimonides’ writings are not clear. (Indeed, the confusion reinforces the picture of confusion and disarray in the northern

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French rabbinical establishment by the 1230s.) Some of these rabbis responded by issuing a ban (ខherem) on the works of Maimonides and all “Greek” (philosophical) science. Amazingly, the ban applied to all Jews in all lands for all time. In retaliation, a group of pro-Maimunist rabbis in Provence sent an ambassador to Catalonia to urge a counterban; that ambassador was David Qimhi ខ (“Radaq”), the famed exegete from Narbonne. As the controversy escalated, a number of French rabbis reversed themselves on their ban, while others may have excommunicated Qimhi. ខ According to Solomon bar Abraham, he was threatened by the Jews in Orl´eans and B´eziers, and he turned in desperation to the Christian authorities, asking them to review the offending books. His opponents accused him bitterly of betraying the works of their master. Maimonides’ books were burned in 1232. Despite Hillel of Verona’s claim that the controversial books were also burned in Paris, most scholars believe that only one conflagration took place, in Montpellier. Hillel was writing nearly sixty years after the event, and not necessarily for historical accuracy.109 Intriguingly, he associates the burning of 1232 with that of the Talmud ten years later (events he believes to be separated in time by a mere forty days). For Hillel, the burning of the Talmud in Paris was God’s way of punishing the French rabbis for their role in the attack on Maimonides’ writings. For those who doubted that God would account “1,200 volumes” of Talmud and midrashic learning the equivalent price of the Guide and Book of Knowledge, Hillel averred that “Rabbenu Moses” (ben Maimon) “was practically a second Moses to his generation, and all the righteousness of the generation depended upon him:110 And do not be surprised if the Holy One, Blessed be He, punished the Law [Torah] of the French Jews on behalf of Rabbenu Moses, or that He did not have mercy on their books of Talmud. Rather He appeared over them in a pillar of fire and cloud until He roused all the clerics against them and the great persecutions were renewed. Communities were slaughtered, more than 3000 [Jews], and their Talmuds were given to burning and blaze. Then the decree went forth that they should no longer openly study Talmud unto the present day. And if you ask how we know that the persecutions were related to the burning of the Guide and the Book of Knowledge, I will answer you that the sign and proof are that not forty days elapsed between the burning of our teacher’s books and the burning of the Talmud. Moreover, they were burned in the very same place, all the compilations and commentaries to be found in Paris, so that the ashes of the Talmud mingled with the ashes of the Guide and the Book of Knowledge, for those ashes were still there.111

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The voluminous correspondence that flew between representatives of the Jewish communities in Spain, Provence, and northern France has survived in a lopsided fashion: Almost all of the surviving letters represent Maimonides’ defenders, and they often provide polemical more than factual accounts. It is not my intent here to render judgment on the thorny issues posed by the letters and their utility in reconstructing events. For our purposes, however, several points should be made. First, the above passage suggests the degree to which martyrological imagery and language have penetrated to very different sorts of writing by the late thirteenth century. In other words, not merely can a case be made for the influence of the Maimunist controversy on Meir of Rothenburg in 1242, but also for the reciprocal observation that the martyrocentrism of Ashkenaz and northern French Jewry had an impact on Jewish writers in Spain and Provence. In fact, this influence can be documented while the controversy still raged, for instance in a letter from two of Maimonides’ defenders, the brothers Ibn Hisdai: They [the anti-Maimunists] turned over the Book of Knowledge and the Guide to the Major and Minorite friars. They said to them: “Why do you wear yourselves out going to the ends of the earth and wandering the distant sea, chasing after heretics to your law in order to burn the evil in your midst? Behold, here we, too, have books, books of heretics and apostates, called Knowledge and the Guide, which have blood on their hands. You are obligated to guard us from stumbling as much as yourselves, so arise and go out against them.112 Jewish descriptions of crusader attacks in 1096 had attributed a remarkably similar rhetorical point to their Christian foes. Compare this excerpt from the chronicle of Solomon bar Samson: As they [the crusaders] passed through the villages where there were Jews, they said to each other: “Here we travel a distant path seeking the house of abomination and to avenge ourselves upon the Ishmaelites. But behold, here are the Jews who dwell in our midst and whose ancestors killed and crucified [Jesus] for no reason. Let us avenge ourselves upon them first.113 A certain martyrological flavor may even be detected in the pro-Maimunists’ assertions that R. Solomon b. Abraham and his cohorts were punished for their sins by the same Christian authorities they had drawn into the fray. According to these accounts, the rabbis were convicted as false witnesses and sentenced to lose their tongues.114 Commenting on this rumor (true and justified, in their opinion), the Ibn Hisdai brothers

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wrote that popular scorn for Solomon and his friends found expression in a satirical ditty, which they quote: Those who opposed and betrayed the Guide were teachers of no worth Because they were deceitful, God hit them where it hurt: Their mouths were turned to Heaven—but their tongues went down to earth.115 It is unlikely that “popular scorn” produced a skilled piece of poetry in the aphoristic, satirical tradition and quantitative metrics of Spanish Hebrew verse.116 Nonetheless, here is evidence that the battle over Maimonides’ books was fought in verse as well as in prose. Moreover, Meir of Rothenburg could have read much of this literature, as a selection of the letters was collected and published in 1234 in Abraham b. Azriel’s compendium, the Arugat haBosem.117 Indeed, he must have read at least some of these letters and their appended verses. A collection of epigrams and longer poems that responded to the controversy includes another clever and biting little poem attributed to Abraham b. Maimon (Maimonides’ son), a tercet that reads in translation: How foolish are those who think they have burned books of delight, more precious than gold! They are a consuming fire, so how could a fire consume them? Consider this, O fools / burners and Rahab’s helpers: They were not [burned] but went up in fire to God like Tishbi, like an angel amidst the flame.118 Meir’s description of the burning Talmuds uses almost identical language, since the expression “consuming fire” can also describe God (which is how I translated it above—see Deut. 9:3): How could she who was given by the consuming fire [⳱ flaming God] be consumed by the fire?119 Moreover, a number of the satirical epigrams that respond to the controversy address Maimonides’ books (specifically, the Guide) directly, as personified objects of praise or wrath.120 Apparently, these made some impression on Meir. Still, letters and jingles were not the only literature the controversy generated. One of Maimonides’ detractors wrote serious poems, and some were addressed to his books. The poet Meshullam DaPiera was a friend of R. Moses b. Nahman’s ខ (Nahmanides, ខ or the “Ramban”) from Gerona. In some senses a peacemaker between the contending parties, Nahmanides ខ was offended by the khubris of the northern French rabbis who presumed to declare a ban effective beyond their boundaries, but he was sympathetic to the anti-

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Maimunist declarations ascribed to them. Unlike his friend the Ramban, DaPiera was uninterested in diplomacy, and his pointed arrows were aimed with a sure hand. DaPiera wrote several poems attacking the works of Maimonides and praising the efforts of Solomon b. Abraham of Montpellier and the northern French rabbis who had gone to war against them.121 Of forty-nine extant poems by this poet, seven attack Maimonides, his philosophy and his works, and two poems specifically address a personified Guide to the Perplexed. In one scathing couplet, DaPiera writes: O Guide to the Perplexed, be silent and shut your mouth! These are things we have never heard before now. Those who say that Scripture is allegory, and its Prophet [a man of] dreams, shall bear their sin.122 And in a longer poem: O Guide to the Perplexed, Prophecy has a quarrel with you and will challenge you to war. Your book has said original things, their likes unwritten and unmentioned in legends, It banishes signs and omens and describes their Creator’s wonders as fashioned. O how they have undone the bonds of my faith, and without hands have untied the laces of my books! They have taken and belittled a precious stone from the necklace, and the necklace stones have been scattered.123 Unsurprisingly, the fanatical self-righteousness that characterized the so-called Maimunist controversy spilled over to the ranks of lesser-known scholars as well. In the early thirteenth century, ostensibly motivated by a (strong) distaste for anthropomorphisms, a rabbi named Abba Shalom recorded with satisfaction his incineration of an offending text.124 Around the same time, one of the works of the great Spanish Hebrew writer, Judah ibn Shabbetai, was burned in Saragossa and lost forever. From Ibn Shabbetai’s complaint in a later work, we learn that the unfortunate text was a chronicle of Spanish history (remarkably, Jewish and Christian). Ibn Shabbetai remarks: These people gave evil counsel. . . . they declared a holiday in the Temple and courtyard, and burned a book that was both law and teaching [te’udah vetorah]. They had no fear of God, whose glorious and awesome Name I had put among its letters.125 In sum, the sight of Jews burning Jewish books may have been commoner than is generally thought.

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Thus, a number of rich literary traditions stood at Meir’s disposal when he composed his lament for the Talmud in 1242. Some of those came from a martyrological repertoire and some came from very different sorts of writing, but together they imply a universe of poetic possibility from which a gifted young poet could draw, adapt, and innovate to create something “new.” The result was an elegiac and yet polemical blend of longing and sorrow that reflected the centrality of rabbinic learning in the world of the academy. At the same time, when viewed in its proper context, Meir’s lament also refracts through its sources some of the factionalized and fractious world in which it was written, a time when the glory of kings and churchmen was less than glorious for their Jews. Uncertainty and a sense of siege may be especially difficult emotions for a young man to suffer, and we sense them stirring in the anguished frustration that echoes through Meir’s polemic of desire. Jewish learning, as we have seen, was under concerted attack. Over the thirteenth century, the scattered poetic remains that document persecutions against Jewish communities in royal France often refer to burning books. Other texts are cited as proof of the resulting Jewish book shortage.126 How much this shortage was limited to France may ironically be gleaned from a later complaint of Meir of Rothenburg himself. In prison from 1286 until his death in 1293, the venerable scholar continued to write and work. Significantly, his own complaints about library resources concern his conditions in imprisonment only; he gives no indication that his particular difficulties in obtaining books are shared by the Jewish scholars of Ashkenaz.127 The Talmud was condemned repeatedly over the coming years, and the conflagrations—fed by decreasing numbers of books—would recur. In 1320, John XXII issued yet another bull calling for the confiscation and burning of the Talmud. The Jewish communities of France petitioned him to relent but to no avail; in 1321, the bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier, had the Talmud burned there, and again during Lent in Paris.128 In this case, a fast-day liturgy the Jews recited to save their books still survives in an Italian maខhzor dated to 1420.129 Unremarkable in most respects, the liturgy is nonetheless touching in its repeated and anxious invocations to El hanishkaខhot, the Lord of the forgotten. If the expression reflects the petitioners’ fear that God has forgotten them, its insistent repetition suggests the fear that without their books, the Jews will no longer remember themselves. What is threatened with the loss of their books is the fragile weave of sacred and social history wrought by learning and memory. Meir the young poet successfully captured the tone of bereavement following the events of 1242 in ways an older, more mature poet—even an older, more mature Meir—could not have. The polemical and satirical

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restlessness of DaPiera’s poems, the exquisite lyrical imagery of HaLevi’s Zionide lament, the longing devotion to the Beloved of vernacular songs, all fuse in a remarkable tribute to Jewish study and students. In 1242, the Jews of France stood, not at Sinai, but at the brink of its possible reversal. When the tide finally turned, or what gave the tired and battered communities new strength to resist the crescendo of forces against them, is not clear. But by the 1270s, it would be clear to the Crown and the Church that their strategy to convert the Jews had not succeeded. Was it clear to the Jews themselves? The next chapter looks at a martyrological poem from the latter half of the century, and asks what it can tell us.

Notes This chapter is an expanded and revised version of a lecture I delivered at Trinity University in San Antonio on April 9, 2000. That lecture has appeared as a monograph, “Trial by Fire: Burning Jewish Books,” Lectures on Medieval Judaism at Trinity University, Occasional Papers, 3 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). I am grateful to Richard Newhauser, whom I met at the National Humanities Center in the spring of 2000, for the invitation to “test fly” this work at his home institution. 1. There have been several biographical studies of Meir of Rothenburg, which differ considerably in their interpretation of the later part of his life, but maintain consistency (perhaps due to a relative lack of interest) in the treatment of his youth. See Urbach, 1955, esp. pp. 401–46; Wellecsz; and Agus. For a recent and more popular biographical essay, see Kanarfogel, 1992–93. Agus’s reconstruction of Meir’s life, and his development as a legal scholar, are based on a hypothetical dating of responsa and treated skeptically by modern scholars. Nonetheless, his treatment of Meir’s youth in the small first chapter (pp. 3–13) is similar to Urbach’s and Wellecsz’s. 2. For Judah as a student of R. Yehiel’s, see Wellecsz, p. 235. “Dialectic” here refers to precisely the same kind of activity that characterized Scholastic methods, and, for that matter, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century compilations of canon law—namely, the gathering of often contradictory statements of theological or legal principle and their reconciliation by hermeneutic. 3. See Simha ខ Goldin, 1996a. 4. For a general history of the period, see Chazan, 1973a; and Jordan, 1989. 5. Contrast the situation in nearby Germany, where educational efforts targeted the “primary” levels of schooling; see Kanarfogel, 1993. 6. Some scholars have argued that the loss of creativity in the northern French schools was the result of an internal dynamic and not a direct consequence of persecution; see Soloveitchik, 1998. Kanarfogel, albeit with different conclusions, also prefers to focus on curricular emphases as the chief cause of shifts in academic focus; see Kanarfogel, 1993. Chazan’s emphasis on R. Tam as a figure who exercised unparalleled control over northern French Jewish life perhaps colors his perception that no “centralizing force” like R. Tam appeared after his death; see

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Chazan, 1973a, p. 96; he still concedes the growing prominence of French academies in the following decades. Nonetheless, a composite reading of the situation is desirable; i.e., the difficulties posed by persecution, attrition, and the increasing instability of life must have had some impact on internal academic developments, just as conversely the loss of a dynamic intellectual elite must have affected the ability of the academy to respond to the new crisis. 7. Ivan Marcus, 1993, or in the slightly revised French version published in 1994. Common sense also suggests the strategical value of prominent converts. See the discussion of Meir of Narbonne below, and the references there. Christian missionizing policy in the New World would later draw upon its experience at home, and New World missionaries also tried to win over figures of local prominence to Christianity; see Kenneth Mills. 8. Soloveitchik, 1998, p. 74; Urbach, 1955, p. 211. 9. Mordecai, the author of the important compilation known by his name (the Sefer haMordecai), was killed in 1289. See Urbach, 1955, p. 436. 10. See chapter 1. 11. The unwilling convert was a source of potential danger as well as grief for his or her community of origin. The convert who later reverted to Judaism fell within the jurisdiction of the Church and was treated as a heretic; any Jew who was suspected of abetting him or her in returning to Judaism was liable to prosecution as well. See Yosef Yerushalmi, 1970, and the discussion in the next chapter. 12. Meir’s disputation is preserved in Ms. Parma 2749, along with the famous letter he wrote to King Louis protesting the ban on Jewish usury (following the Melun ordinance of 1230). The manuscript, over two hundred folios, has never been fully published, although a substantial portion was edited in the dissertation of William K. Hershkowitz. See Stein, 1969, esp. p. 21; and 1959; Chazan, 1985; and for a partial Hebrew text, with introduction, Moses Judah HaCohen Blau, pp. 11–21. For the impact of the stabilimentum of 1223 and the ordinance of 1230, see Jordan, 1989, pp. 129–33. 13. Jordan, 2001. 14. In fact, Donin was excommunicated by R. Yehiel around 1225; see Joseph haMeqanne’s account of the trial, Vikuaខh Rabbenu Yeខhiel, ed. Reuven Margoliouth, 1974–75, p. 15 (henceforth, Joseph haMeqanne’, 1974–75). Other cases are well known: Besides Donin, who was assisted by at least one other convert, Pablo Christiani was called from Spain by Louis IX to preach to his Jews in 1269; the stories of Herman the Jew, Abner of Burgos, and other prominent (and polemical) converts, and their roles in the new missionizing, have received much study. See Chazan, 1989; Jeremy Cohen, 1982; 1999c, pp. 334–42; Mann. 15. See chapter 1. 16. Jordan, 1989, pp. 150–52, relying on royal subsidies to converts, notes the increase in the 1250s and 1260s; see also Shatzmiller, 1995. The number of papal letters that deal with the problem of subsidies for converts, or converts who relapse, also increases during this period; Grayzel 1989; and see the formularies published by Grayzel in 1955a. David Berger has noted a tone of increased anxiety in the Jewish polemical literature. He claims that the Sefer Yosef haMeqanne’ of Joseph Official (haMeqanne’), R. Yehiel’s student and the author of the Hebrew

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account of the Talmud Trial, was directed primarily to apostates; see David Berger, 1986, p. 591. See also Yerushalmi, 1970, pp. 326, 334–35. 17. Soloveitchik, 1976, p. 350. According to Soloveitchik, the French Tosafists “evinced no interest in piyyut.” In contrast, Kanarfogel commented on the “interesting correlation between French Tosafists who commented on or wrote piyyutim and those who authored peshat commentaries. The disappearance of piyyut composition and commentary in northern France coincides with the last of the pashtanim.” See Kanarfogel, 1993, p. 84. His note refers to the composition of piyyut commentary only. The composition of piyyut, he has more recently acknowledged, must have continued. Personal communication, January 2000. 18. See, for instance, Habermann, 1945a, pp. 183–85; and Bernfeld. 19. The Anjou poem, by Solomon b. Joseph, was published by Salfeld, “Abi’ah miqreh,” pp. 352–55, with a German translation on pp. 355–58; the relevant poems of Tuvia of Vienne are in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 1:191–202 (nos. 88–93); Moses bar Natan’s “Memeiខzar zខ a’aqti” is in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 2:474–75, no. 209; Moses b. Isaac’s “Selah, ខ elohim, le’avoni” and David b. Samson’s “Dam nizraq” are in Schirman, 1939, pp. 44–46 and 43–44 respectively. 20. See Darmesteter, 1874; 1881; Einbinder, 1999. The fifth lament was included by Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 2:632–36. See chapter 5. 21. Shohet describes an ecclesiastical hearing in Paris that condemned to the flames a heretical (Christian) work, followed in 1225 by the burning of the books of John the Scot, the confiscation of books by one David de Dinant, and the prohibition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the University of Paris. See Shohet, p. 35. See also the references in the Sefer Hasidim to Jews burning Jewish books (Parma ed., par. 405 ⳱ Bologna, par. 249); I am grateful to Ivan Marcus for this reference. 22. Wellecsz, pp. 227, 232; Agus, p. 7.; 23. Wellecsz, p. 237; Agus, p. 9; Urbach, 1955, p. 410. 24. Kanarfogel weighs the evidence pro and con, but also concludes that “Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg . . . was perhaps ten when he studied with R. Isaac Or Zarua’ for the first time,” which would make him even younger than my estimate when he arrived in Paris. Kanarfogel, 1992–93, p. 18 (and see n. 14 on pp. 121–22). 25. Grayzel, 1933, 1:29. 26. Jordan, 1989, pp. 136–37. 27. The story has been discussed abundantly. See Rosenthal; Merchavia; Rembaum; Dahan, 1990b; Jordan, 1992; and most recently Jeremy Cohen, 1999c, pp. 317–64. Solomon Grayzel has provided both the relevant papal bulls and introductory essays in Church and Jew in the Thirteenth Century (1933 and 1966 eds. covering 1190–1254 and the 1989 edition, edited and with an introduction by Kenneth Stow, covering 1254–1314). 28. Rosenthal, p. 70. 29. Rosenthal, p. 71; Joseph haMeqanne’, 1974–75, p. 6. 30. Jordan, 1992, pp. 65–66. As Jordan notes there, the “trial” does not “conform to inquisitorial practice, which in any case was hardly fixed, given the fact that the Inquisition was only a few years old and its procedures inchoate. Nor

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was there any reason that the French government would opt to employ an ecclesiastical process . . . in a forum under the presidency of the crown.” 31. Joseph haMeqanne’, 1974–75; Merchavia (above, n. 27) contains a Hebrew translation of the Latin record as well. The Latin was included in Isidore Loeb’s early article. The Latin source is Biblioth`eque Nationale (Paris) Latin 16558; for a brief description and excerpts translated to French, see Dahan, 1990b, p. 107. 32. Urbach, 1955, p. 375, citing the Shibbolei ha-leqet, s. 263. 33. Jordan, 1989, p. 72, lists all these dates except the last, for which, see below. 34. Joseph haMeqanne’, 1974–75, p. 13. 35. Urbach, 1955, p. 410. Agus assumed that R. Meir remained in Rothenburg until his departure in 1286 and arrest, see n. 46 to p.12. Wellecsz (p. 230) mentions the curious fact that Meir refused to visit his father (in Worms), which he attempts to interpret as a sign of respect (presumably, in other words, not to humiliate the father by outshining him). Urbach (1955, p. 406) discusses the various interpretations that have been offered for Meir’s behavior, concluding also that the son sought to avoid embarrassing his father: “he knew that his father would judge himself harshly and would stand [i.e., in deference, and not sit] before his son, and in order to avoid this, he did not wish to encounter him.” The explanation stretches credibility too far, I think. It seems to me more likely (and more interesting) that the brilliant and headstrong young son had a tense relationship with his less brilliant father and turned his back on him upon his return from France. 36. The legislation that permitted the extradition of Jews to the domain of the lord whose property they were legally considered (tamquam proprium servum) was approved in royal France in 1230 and by Rudolf sometime after his ascension to the throne in 1273; see Agus, 139 and 143–44, where he argues the relevant legislation was passed in 1284. For royal France, see Jordan, 1989, p. 136, and Langmuir, 1990a. 37. Urbach, 1955, p. 426; and see Agus, pp. 125–57 (whose reconstruction is less reliable). As for the legend that holds that Meir’s arrest was due to the prior arrest of a son, for whom he pledged a considerable ransom only to have the son bolt from prison, cited in the collected responsa of Haim Or Zarua’ (no. 164), Urbach comments that “there is no hint in all the literature that R. Meir had a son;” see Urbach, 1955, p. 426, n.14. In this context, it is worth noting that the son of Meir’s teacher, R. Yehiel, was reportedly arrested around the time of the Talmud trial and vowed upon his release to emigrate to the Holy Land. His father released him from his vow until they could go together, which they did in approximately 1260. See Urbach, 1955, p. 378. Is it possible that the story of Yehiel and his son influenced later legends about the Maharam? 38. See Grossman, 1988, pp. 75–101. 39. Meir of Rothenburg, “Sha’ali serufah ba-esh.” The Hebrew poem has been published in many places. I rely on the critical edition of Goldschmidt, 1972, pp. 135–37. See also Habermann, 1945a, pp. 183–85; and Bernfeld, 1: 307–310. The lament also appears in the regular liturgy for the Ninth of Av; see Rosenfeld, pp. 161–62. The poem was also translated by Chazan, 1980, pp.

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229–31, although his translation contains several inaccuracies, and again by Roskies, pp. 85–87. All translations in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. 40. Cf. 1 Kings 2:20ff., I Sam. 30:3 (alluding to captured women). The “one burned in fire” is simultaneously the Torah (in its collective sense of Oral and Written Law) and Zion, more specifically the burned Sanctuary in Zion’s midst. 41. Amos 2:7. 42. Isa. 50:10. 43. Isa.13:8. 44. Deut. 9:3. 45. Cf. Isa. 43:2. 46. O dainty foe (RSV: pleasure-lover) (‘adinah), i.e., the enemy. See Isa. 47:8. Chazan translates vv. 13–18 as directed to the Talmud-Torah, but this is improbable. The address sets a female personification of the enemy against the conflated female personification of “Torah” and Zion. See also Isa. 30:15. 47. Prov. 24:31. The “flowers” are an allusion to the pirខhei-kehunah (lit., “flowers of the priesthood”), i.e., the students. 48. Ps. 137:8. 49. Flame and fire—Gen. 15:17; Zech. 12:6; but probably most intended is the Sinai imagery of Exod. 20:15ff. 50. Lit., so are you with your speech. 51. See the Targum to Isa. 28:5 for kelilah and note the addition of “messiah” there. 52. Prov. 26:11—as the dog returns to its vomit, the fool returns to (shoneh can also mean “doubles”) his folly. 53. Exod. 22:3, 6–8, and Baba Qama 7:1, Sanh. 1:1. According to Goldschmidt, it is possible to read the verse as referring to “twofold damages” owed to or by Israel. The pun also suggests that the “double” attack of the Christians corresponds to the double nature of Jewish Law (Oral and Written). 54. Cf. Isa. 33:4. 55. Expelled (nidaខhat). He/they whom you rejected refers to Donin? 56. Lam. 1:4. The sense of the verse is that the ways are desolate, as if they were mourning. 57. See Rashi and the Targum to Cant. 2:17 , “the shadows fled”—we sinned with the Golden Calf and therefore the shade of God’s protection was removed. 58. Isa. 49:21. 59. Lit., at the top of the mountain of your tower, drawing on Isa. 30:17 (“like a mast on the top of a mountain”). 60. Impossible. Lit., the cords of the drums of your pipes. Some kind of wind instrument that requires skins and cords? 61. Jer. 15:8. 62. Destruction, as in Jer. 17:18; lit., brokenness, as in Ezek. 21:11. 63. Jer. 2:2. 64. I.e., to divide the people and destroy its leaders. 65. Ps. 90:15, and for the particular use of ‘enut, Ps. 22:25 ⳱ RSV 22:24. 66. For shefel as a condition of lowliness, see Ps. 136:23 (in our degradation, He remembered us). 67. Cf. Isa. 49:18; Exod. 15:20.

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68. Ps. 18:29 ⳱ RSV 18:28; Isa. 58:10. 69. The allusion hangs on the use of the verb hishtomem, see HaLevi, vv. 25, 28; and Meir, v. 3. Meir also captures in this verse HaLevi’s phrase hako’avim ‘al shomemutekh (who feel pain over your desolation, vv. 49–50). A ion, qeខhi kol zខ ri,” by Abraham Hozeh (twelfth cent.), in Rosenfeld, p. 154; 70. “Z A ion ‘ateret zខ vi,” by Eleazer haDarshan (d. 1221), in ibid., pp. 155–56; “Z A ion “Z yedidut yedid,” by Jacob (late eleventh or early twelfth cent.), in ibid., pp. 158–60; A ion zខ efirat pe’er,” by Meir ben Eleazer (early thirteenth cent.), in ibid., pp. 163– “Z A ion bemishpat lekhi,” by Joseph b. Jacob (eleventh cent.), in ibid., p. 165. 65; “Z 71. It is unnecessary to “prove” that thirteenth-century French Jews would have known contemporary vernacular poetry. Their own vernacular was French, as their glosses and even liturgical composition evidence; see D. Blondheim; M. Banitt, 1966 and 1967; and Einbinder, 1999. Although it is southern, the Carpentras rite indicates that a number of liturgical poems were sung to vernacular tunes; see for instance the incipits to the piyyutim “Evkeh belev mar” and “Meqor-dem’ah eten ‘einai” in Seder le-arba’ zខ omot ule-arba’ parshiyyot keminhaq q’’q Carpentras (Amsterdam: 1759–62) ff. 109b–110b and 113b–114b. 72. Speeches or poems addressed to personified objects (or spoken by personified objects) also feature in the rhetorical exercises of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, writing in the same period as Meir. I thank Marjorie Curry Woods for allowing me access to her study-in-progress of Geoffrey’s Poetria Nova. 73. Chazan, 1987, p. 20, speaks of the “apparently widespread use of French as a vernacular among German and English Jews.” Urbach (1955, p. 224) describes Jewish reliance on the French vernacular in daily life, citing a responsum preserved in the writings of the Or Zaru’a and Meir of Rothenburg. 74. See Page; Everist; Huot, 1989 and 1997; Kidwell; Dronke. 75. Thibaut of Champagne, pp. 232–33 (song no. 54). 76. Jordan, 1992, p. 63; David Berger, 1979, p. 302; Yerushalmi, 1970, pp. 357–63. On Christian literary reflections of Marian devotion, see also Mooney, pp. 52–77 and esp. pp. 67–70. 77. Jeremy Cohen (1999c, p. 319) reads the poem’s parable of the king who weeps with foreknowledge of his son’s death similarly, as a counterpoint to the Christian tale of the Last Supper. 78. Seliខhot, Minhag Ashkenaz (Salonika, 1550), f.176. My thanks to Herbert Zafren and Noni Rudavsky of the Hebrew Union College Klau library, who so generously aided me in locating this and other sources in the Klau collection. 79. See Zunz, 1865, p. 591; Salfeld, p. 353. Salfeld tentatively identified the author with the Solomon b. Joseph who composed a lament for the martyrs of Anjou; see below. 80. Isa. 62:7; Mic. 1:8. 81. Num. 11:19; Mic. 1:8. 82. Ezek. 7:17 or 21:12. The copyist has erred, substituting libi bam for lemayim. Libi. 83. Gen. 31:29. 84. Cf. Ezek. 8:14, where Tammuz, however, is the name of a vegetation god who dies and revives each year. 85. Isa. 60:19. Yufaru is unattested biblically, but the verb is often used in conjunction with b’rit (to violate . . . the covenant); notice the use of berit in v. 7.

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86. Ps. 137:7. 87. The verse seems to refer to Job 3:23 (for my sighing comes before my bread). 88. Isa. 33:7; Jer. 31:14–15 (⳱ RSV 31:15). Cf. also Gen. 37:55. 89. Lev. 13:45; 21:10 and Judg. 16:16 with Gen. 27:46. A 90. Halatz hខ alifatam— hខ alaខz is usually used with shoes, not clothing (Deut. 25:9; Isa. 20:2), but n.b. the beginning of Benjamin’s v. 14. 91. Compare Ezek. 34:6. 92. The Light of Life, i.e., the Torah. 93. I have reversed the order of the attributes. Literally, the verse reads “for You are One who dons vengeance and who is full of wrath.” Ps. 74:10, 18, and compare Ps. 74:7–8 (they have set Your sanctuary afire). For lovesh neqamot, cf. Isa. 59:17 (and n.b. again the context, God will see that there is no justice on earth and intervene). For ba’al hខ emah (and in conjunction with naqam), see Nah. 1:2, which Rashi again glosses with respect to the destruction of the Temple and the exile to Babylonia. 94. Ps. 79:12. 95. Cf. Ps. 80:6; Num. 9:18. 96. Urbach, 1955, p. 94. 97. For Solomon b. Simhah, ខ see the next chapter. For more about Meir, see Einbinder, 2000b. 98. Habermann, 1945a; Schirmann, 1939, pp. 25–74; Bernfeld; plus the laments included in Salfeld, and more recently in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel. 99. Zunz dated Moses bar Nathan’s lament, “Mimeiខzar zខ a’aqti,” to 1327; see Leser Landshuth, p. 256. However, among the manuscript sources Goldschmidt and Fraenkel cite for the poem are Parma 654, a Burgundy maខhzor copied in 1304 and Oxf. Bodl. Arch-Seld.A.3 (Neubauer 1159), a thirteenth-century codex. 100. Ivan Marcus suggests that the distinction between scroll and book is also iconographical, that is, that the Jewish authors intended the image of Christians destroying sacred scrolls as an iconic representation of Christian enmity for Judaism (symbolized by the scrolls of the Law). While he remains less convinced by my gender distinction, he agrees that the prose texts (both 1096 and Ephraim’s Sefer Zekhirah) depict the desecration of scrolls, not codices, and that the increased depiction of the latter might indeed correlate to an increased Christian awareness of the existence and significance of the Oral Law in Jewish life (private communication, September 6, 2000). 101. Samuel bar Abraham haLevi, “Ein lanu elohim ‘od zulatekha,” for the martyrs of Frankfurt (1241), in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 176–78 and also in Bernfeld, 1:301–305; Mordecai bar Joseph, “Eikhah ashuvah,” for the martyrs of Kruzencau (?), Bacharach, Rokenhausen, and Mainz (1283), in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 195–97; and a poem attributed to Meir of Rothenburg, “Ahbirah ខ milin,” which Habermann dates to some time “after 1235” for martyrs in Siebenbrunn. Since the poem describes a host desecration libel, it is in all likelihood much later. For the poem, see Habermann, 1945a, pp. 181–83. On the history of the host desecration libel, see Rubin, 1999. On the virtues of “intactness” in female hagiography, see Cazelles; Coon, 1997; Mooney.

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102. Bernfeld (p. 209), citing a 1096 lament, for the shoes; Meir of Rothenburg’s (if he is indeed the author) “Ahbirah ខ milin” for the drums, in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 181–83. The latter example continues to bother me; Habermann reads the verses as a description of scrolls converted to drums but I think, despite the difficulty of the verse, that it may describe the desecration of the scrolls while drums and music are played. The line reads: vkdnv kf ou, sg / vkkj,b kzrc -arujku ,ukujnu ohpu,k / vkft l,kdnu l,ru, xf, Perhaps: “the wall of Your Torah, Your scroll, was consumed / to [the sound of?] drums and dances and iron rakes it was desecrated / until the scroll was finished.” 103. Lamentations Rabbah 2:2, 3:39; the story is repeated in the Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 57b-58a. 104. Mordecai bar Eleazer, “Ba’ti lefanekha,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 159– 60; also in Bernfeld 1:258–62. 105. Qalonymos bar Judah, “Mi yiten roshi mayim,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 66–69; and in Bernfeld, 1:202–205. 106. Ibid. 107. The following summary relies on the discussions in Urbach, 1947; Shatzmiller, 1969 and 1970; and Shohet. 108. Indeed, Solomon b. Abraham reserved special wrath for Ibn Tibbon, the translator, who by clarifying obscure passages in his source increased the dangers posed by the text. Shohet, p. 29. 109. Hillel’s letter to the doctor Isaac is found in Ashkenazi, pp. 70–73. Baer rejected his account of the burning. See Urbach, 1947, p. 155. 110. Ashkenazi, p. 71. 111. Ibid. For the view that Hillel refers to massacres in Anjou (1236), see Margoliouth’s note in his edition of the Vikuaខh Rabbenu Yeខhiel (p. 4, n. 23). See also David. On p. 252, David discusses the reference in a liturgical poem, copied in 1242– 43, to great bloodshed in Paris, “the city of blood.” 112. The letter of the brothers Ibn Hisdai, sent to the Jewish communities in Castile and Aragon, published in Halberstam, p. 49. 113. From the Hebrew chronicle of Solomon bar Samson, in Habermann, 1945a, p. 24. 114. See the comment of Maimonides’ son, Abraham, who collected and edited a group of the letters, in Shatzmiller, 1969 p. 126, n. 5; the letter from Lunel, cited in ibid., p. 135; the letter written by the Ibn Hisdai brothers, Halberstam, p. 51; and the letter written by Hillel of Verona, in Halberstam, p. 71. Shohet assumes the claim is ridiculous, but Shatzmiller believes it is plausible. See Shohet, p. 45; Shatzmiller, 1969, p. 135. The letter from the “sages” of Lunel and Narbonne to Spain describes the judicial procedure in convincing detail: “While the meat was still between their teeth, God grew angry with them, and their tongues brought about their downfall and disaster. They were arrested by the lord [?], brought to the scaffold to be judged, and sentenced to have their tongues cut out. The king’s servants rose against them in rage and took revenge. They stripped off their clothes, removed their shoes and tied their hands to their bodies. The prisoner’s chain hung from their necks with a sharpened razor at their throats. The ban went before them saying, look, see the deeds of these sinners who testified falsely against members of their own faith. They

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brought them to the place of sentencing, their tongues were cut off and they were banished in shame and disgrace from their city.” The letter is appended to Shatzmiller, 1969, p. 141. It is tempting to wonder if the line in Solomon’s poem “they stripped off their clothes and went barefoot” might refer to this incident. 115. Ibn Hisdai, in Halberstam, 51; the punch line is cited by Hillel of Verona, in Halberstam, p. 71. As I have taken some liberty with the translation, I provide the Hebrew here: .rj uvub,bu esm .rp hbpk .rp ktv .rtc lkv, obuaku

vrun kg tua hrun une oc .rphu ock ekj ovhp ohnac u,a

116. Some medieval sources attributed the poem to Abraham ben Maimon, Maimonides’ son. See Steinschneider, poem no. 60 on p. 18 and the note on p. 30. 117. Such as the letter of Meir b. Todros haLevi (censored by Abraham) and the response by R. Eleazer b. Judah of Worms (the “Rokeah”). See Urbach, 1947, p. 150. 118. The poem puns on the homophone bo’er (rguc, which can mean “burn” or “fool.” See Steinschneider, no. 42 on p. 15. Another collection of epigrams was published by Deinard. See also Schirmann, 1997, pp. 284–303. The Hebrew text of the poem reads as follows: cvzn ureh ,usunj hrpx cvr hrzugu ohrguc ,tzk ubhc cvkv lu,c ltknfu atc

urgc hf ohrnutv urgc vn okft, at lhtu vnv vkfut at ktk hca, unf ukg kct vz tk

119. Verse 11 in the translation. In Hebrew, the similarity of the verses is clear: atc kfut, vkfut atc vbu,b vfht 120. Of Steinschneider’s sixty-nine epigrams and poems, eight fall in this category (nos. 7, 9, 24, 42, 48, 49, 50, and 51). Several in Deinard’s catalogue also address a personified Guide. 121. Ibid., nos. 42–44. At the same time, DaPiera also demonstrates that the fame of the Jewish martyrs from France and Ashkenaz had captured the attention (and admiration) of Jewish intellectuals in Spain. Why would these exemplars of faith martyr themselves, DaPiera asks, if (as his critics accused Maimonides of saying) there was no eternal reward or punishment? As for Those who were slain for God’s Name as a lesson in faith, My heart is with the mighty ones who were thus plundered. Why should these sages have submitted themselves to slaughter And redeemed their faith with their lives? See Brody, p. 17; the passage is from no. 3, vv. 28–29. 122. Brody, no. 15, p. 39. Cited in Shohet, p. 43. For the poet’s allusion, see Jer. 23:28. 123. Brody, from no. 44, p. 100. As Shohet notes on p. 44, n. 115, Scholem dated these poems to the 1240s, without justifying the claim, but there is “no reason not to relate them to those years in which the controversy was at its height, that is, in the first half of the 1230s.”

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124. The text is cited by Urbach in his edition of Abraham b. Azriel’s thirteenthcentury compendium, the ‘Arugat haBosem, 4:81. Urbach refers to two manuscript sources, Munich 393, f.33a and Oxford 1102 (p. 311 in Neubauer, 1886). Soloveitchik (1976, p. 327) mentions the passage. As found in Urbach, the text reads: “Blessed is God for bringing me here, I, Abba Shalom, say. For I did not come in vain, but to establish the Unity of our Lord, may He be praised forever and ever. And therefore in Soest I burned heretical books in the fire.” See also note 21 above. 125. Wieder, p. 123. 126. See, for instance, the complaint of R. Samuel bar Solomon of Falaise, one of the official defenders of the Talmud in the trial of 1240. R. Samuel begins a response to a legal inquiry by lamenting the shortage of books. He writes, “My spirit is wasted and my strength depleted; the Light of my eyes is gone because of the oppressor, whose hand has grown mighty against us. The soul and delight of our eyes was taken away, and we have no books from which we can gain enlightenment and understanding. May the Mighty One be zealous for His people and say we have suffered enough.” The text is preserved in the collected responsa of Meir of Rothenburg (Prague ed.), no. 250; cited in Urbach, 1955, pp. 377–78. 127. Agus, 1:153, n. 122. 128. Yerushalmi, 1970, p. 327. Yerushalmi connects this incident with the “lament” written by Qalonymos bar Qalonymos in his Even Boខhen. Habermann believes the reference is to the Talmud burning of 1319; see Habermann’s edition of the Even Boខhen, p. 116 and the note on p. 161. The “lament” is not in verse. As did Meir’s poem, it relies on a trope first seen in Qalonymos bar Judah’s 1096 lament. Here it is also adapted: “The Lord’s perfect Law was sanctified on the day of her wedding and given to be burned” (116). 129. Baron, 9:70, mentions the liturgy and maខhzor, which is currently in the possession of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. I thank Menahem Schmelzer of the Seminary for forwarding me copies of the relevant folios. The source is JTS 4510, ff.304a–308a. The liturgy was apparently re-used in Rome for a condemnation of the Talmud there.

FOUR WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS: LITERATURE, HISTORY, AND METHODOLOGY

I

N 1276, a Jew named Samson was broken on the wheel and burned alive in Metz. An imperial town, Metz was on the periphery of the centers of Jewish life in northern France.1 Evidence of the Jewish community disappears in the mid-1220s, and when signs of Jewish life reappear a few decades later, they indicate a community under great pressure. A number of Jews and lepers were burned in 1269, a harbinger of the victimization of both groups in the so-called lepers’ plot of the 1320s. Why exactly Samson was killed and what sort of local tensions, judicial and ecclesiastical processes, and communal difficulties led to his long imprisonment and cruel death we do not know. The story of Samson and his fellow Jews, who they were and how they lived, has been largely erased. In cases like this—and there are many in the history of medieval northern European Jews—commemorative poetry has played a frustrating role in scholarly attempts to reconstruct a historical account of “events.” Where the main goal of researchers has been such historical reconstruction, Hebrew martyrological poetry has posed difficulties precisely because of its resistance to literalist readings. As we have seen, the language and imagery of the poems operate by means of allusion and association that are generally not conducive to linear narrative. One purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how, even so, it is possible to learn a great deal from an obscure poem. Another goal is to explore the impact of the conditions described in the last chapter—intensified persecution, communal disintegration, and increased conversion—on the literary conventions employed in Hebrew martyrological poetry. The preceding two chapters examined a variety of polemical motifs that crystallized along with intensifying pressures to convert. By the mid–thirteenth century, both Christian and Jewish sources convey a corresponding sense of crisis among Jewish communities. What happened next, and how is that reflected in the poetry of martyrdom of the next few decades? In other words, in this chapter I do not just ask what a martyrological lament reveals about historical conditions, but how those historical conditions affected the writing of martyrological laments. Unfortunately, it is not possible to seek this kind of information by a

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literal reading of the poetic texts, as if the poets would (or could, given the constraints of the genre) simply announce that times had changed. For this reason, scholars have often handled poetic “evidence” tentatively (or, on the contrary, with great credulousness), treating it primarily as affective testimony to the anguished faith of survivors. Moreover, for some martyrological poems, such as Benjamin’s lament for Samson of Metz, no external documentation is available to help us to penetrate the shadows of the text. Such poems—no small percentage of the corpus— represent a “worst case scenario” for modern readers. Yet they, too, have much to tell us. Thus I would like in the following pages to use Benjamin’s lament to illustrate the insights and problems that martyrological poetry offers scholars of history and literature, even in cases where the historical circumstances commemorated are difficult or impossible to reconstruct. In essence, this chapter asks if we can find a better way to read. However little we know about Samson of Metz, we can begin with the fact that someone who cared for him deeply wrote a poem to commemorate his death. Benjamin the Scribe inserted a lament for his martyred friend in a miscellany he was responsible for copying, a magnificent illuminated codex that may still be admired today. British Library Add. 11,639, the manuscript containing Benjamin’s compendium of liturgical, lexical, and legal texts, has been the subject of scholarly inquiry on its own merits. The stunning manuscript includes thirty-nine full-page illustrations, which have figured in a scholarly debate over the process by which professional illuminations found their way into Hebrew codexes. If, as seems probable, the illuminators were Christian, the codex ironically testifies to a world of ongoing interactions between Jew and Christian, not always hostile in form or intent.2 Such rare material artifacts embody a central concern of the studies that deal with medieval Jewish life and culture: How do we understand Jewish attitudes, beliefs, and practice both in the context of persecution and the great, often sparkling cultural achievements of the time? As we saw in chapter 1, a creative Jewish poet might give eloquent voice to both cultural realities, at the same time blending characteristic elements of medieval culture with traditional Jewish ones. The illuminated codex testifies that the result was often a paradoxical yet extraordinary testimony to the extent to which medieval northern French Jews were inextricably at home in the culture that tried to estrange or convert them, ultimately to expel them from its midst. If Benjamin’s codex has generated a considerable amount of scholarship over the last few decades, the challenges presented by his poem have not. Yet it is not only Benjamin the Scribe’s exquisite handiwork that causes problems for the scholar of the past. From its somber opening

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verses, Benjamin’s lament for Samson the martyr of Metz illustrates many of the frustrating limitations of conventional historical approaches to medieval Jewish martyrological poetry. Benjamin’s lament also illustrates the potential benefits of an approach that combines literary and historical methods and perspectives. (If there were any conventional literary approaches to this poetry, I would address them, too. But for reasons discussed in the introduction, these have been slow to emerge.) Moreover, while most of the martyrological poems discussed in this book have been cited only in excerpt, this chapter offers an entire poem to readers. In doing so, it permits a more systematic demonstration of the tools available for reading Hebrew martyrological poetry with and without corroborating source material. Let us begin, then, with the poem. For one thing, it is a poem. Scholars have rightfully begun to pay greater attention to the literary shaping of the Hebrew prose martyrological accounts of medieval persecution, namely the three chronicles of First Crusade violence and the late twelfth-century chronicle of Ephraim of Bonn. Several important studies have recently extended these investigations into the realm of ritual and belief, emphasizing the polemical concerns of literature and ritual.3 Yet, as noted in the Introduction, prose commemoration accounts for only a small proportion of Jewish writing about persecution and martyrdom, whereas non-narrative writing exerted an abiding influence in the creation and sustenance of martyrocentric attitudes among medieval Jews. The fact remains that most medieval Jews did not encounter martyrological texts in prose, but in verse—and moreover, verse that was performed in a liturgical setting. As the preceding chapters have hopefully demonstrated, the text of a martyrological poem was only one aspect of a multimedia performance designed less for conveying factual information than for shaping the attitudes and responses of the listeners to events in the outside world.4 Many of the other aspects of that performance have been lost to us: We have almost no information about the melodies or musical character of these laments, or of the oratorical gestures or props that may have accompanied their recitation. Only tiny clues suggest something of the liturgical choreography in which they were embedded.5 The studies in the preceding chapters have also emphasized my belief that just because a poem is a commemorative elegy for one or more Jewish martyrs, its meaning is far from exhausted by the literal facts of persecution and martyrdom. The poems analyzed in this book make clear that any number of cultural debates crystallized in the figure of the martyr, who rapidly became an organizing feature of a wide-ranging and vital set of religious, social, and psychological concerns.6 Rather like a magnet set amid a sea of filings, the martyr was a concept that made sense of

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medieval Jewish life. Martyrological poetry acknowledged the attractions of Christianity in the (sometimes subtle, sometimes crude) ways it depicted the martyr’s heroic refusal to endorse it. So, too, it acknowledged the tastes of its audience in rich allusions and puns for the talmudic scholar that were counterpointed by images of suffering, transcendence, and revenge. Benjamin’s lament for his friend Samson appears on folios 534b–535a of British Library Additional MS. 11,639. The text is marked at various points with marginal corrections, and the ink from the obverse side of the page has seeped through enough to blur the verses to partial illegibility. The poem was published in 1882–83, without voweling or commentary, by Adolphe Neubauer and again in fuller form by Nakdimon Doniach in 1932.7 Neubauer thought the lament referred to a martyrdom in Mainz (perhaps reading .bhn for .hhn), an error Doniach corrected. In other respects, however, Neubauer provided a more accurate transcription than the young Doniach, whose philological and lexical training did not overly sensitize him to the biblical locutions and allusions that were the building blocks of the medieval text. Even this tiny detail permits us a glimpse of historiographical trends. For if the old guard of medieval Hebrew scholarship had derived from the Enlightenment commitments of men raised with traditional religious training, Doniach represented a new generation. Born in London in 1907, he was the son of two Russian Jewish emigr´es who throughout their lifetimes remained intimately associated with the great figures of political Zionism and its attendant Hebrew rebirth. Doniach was drawn to linguistics, studying Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic (and later, Russian), ultimately at Oxford. His skills as a linguist and lexicographer brought him during the war to intelligence work, some of it as a teacher and some as a cryptographer attached in an unclear way to the famed Enigma project.8 Remembered by scholars and friends for his charismatic presence at Oxford, Doniach was quintessentially a “dictionary man,” creator of the Oxford English-Arabic dictionary still in use today. His name would not be associated with any further work in medieval Jewish texts. Doniach was heir to an academic tradition that understood Jewish scholarship as an activity characterized by the transcription, translation, and identification of manuscript texts.9 To this tradition of scholarship he accordingly paid his dues, noting a number of paleographical peculiarities of the codex, stylistic peculiarities of the lament, and situating to the extent he could the plight of Samson the martyr in contemporary events. The latter included the worsening conditions of Jewish life in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and in particular the issuance of Clement

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IV’s bull of 1267 calling for the harsh treatment of relapsed converts to Christianity and of the Jews accused of encouraging their former kin to return to the fold. Doniach speculated that the bull “Turbato corde audivimus,” published approximately a decade before Samson’s death, may have played a role in Samson’s arrest and decade-long imprisonment.10 Much more than that his meager evidence would not permit him to say. There the story for the most part stopped. To my knowledge, this poem would not be mentioned again until it was cited by William Jordan as an illustration of the increased pressures on Jewish life “in the French borderlands” in the late thirteenth century. For the administrative historian who had exposed the nooks and crannies of Capetian policies toward its Jewish minority, Benjamin the Scribe’s lament was an affective testimony to the escalation in harassment of local Jews. Jordan’s attention to poetry and music as vehicles for the mood of a historical moment has always been unusual. Yet for Jordan the lament posed historical problems unimagined by Doniach or Neubauer. Why would a medieval Jew be held in prison for such a long time before being executed? Jordan noted the case of nearby Wesel, in Treves, where an accusation of ritual murder in 1287 (the famed case of “good Werner”) led to the execution of forty Jews and the arrest of the local rabbi.11 He might also have noted the case of the revered scholar and judge, Meir of Rothenburg, who was arrested in Lombardy in 1286 and died in prison seven years later. (We have met the young Meir in chapter 3.) In Meir’s case, as indeed Jordan hypothesizes about Samson, the conditions of his imprisonment owed much to the efforts of the Jewish community to preserve his life. However, the Jewish community of Metz, eroded by conversion and exhausted psychologically and physically, does not seem to have been in any position to ransom a rabbi and scholar. And here, having perhaps exhausted her critical options, History has remained stymied and perplexed. Historians might have asked other questions about Benjamin’s depiction of his friend’s martyrdom. Why would someone be broken on the wheel and then burned as well? Why are the onlookers at Samson’s execution singing? Why does the poet refer to the taking of an oath on a staff or cross? Does Benjamin’s description of “barking” Christians indicate Dominican involvement in Samson’s trial? Why is Samson himself referred to as xbtb, “forced,” a word that may imply he was converted to Christianity? Indeed, this is a poem full of strange details that previous readings have failed to identify or explain. Let us see what a literary perspective, sensitive to history and to context, may tell us. The poem begins and ends with a caption, which I include with the translation.12 A transcription of the Hebrew text is appended following the notes to this chapter.

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Concerning a Martyr in Metz, in the Year 1276 I 1. Take your stand at the gates, Cry aloud long and bitterly,13 2. Like a well that refreshes its waters when they dry up, and the moon that restores its brightness,14 3. On behalf of a righteous man whom they terrorized. They cut much wood to burn him in fire. [And] he was offered as a sweet-smelling sacrifice.15 4. Because he was forced, they set upon him; They gaped and grimaced, [As if] he had fled from God.16 5. O Earth! Do not cover his blood, May his fat and organs and flesh Go up as a savory offering. [Refrain]17 II 6. Those who draw forth iniquity and who backslide to falsehood, The nation that speaks lies,18 7. They bring wheels upon wheels inside wheels [And] coals hot for blowing19 8. And mournfully, they utter laments and woe. The bonds of his hands dissolved like wax, He spread his hands and wailed,20 9. The heart of the crowd went out to him When they saw his hands and eyes yearning To share in God’s portion.21 10. O Earth! Do not cover his blood, May his fat and organs and flesh Go up as a savory offering. III 11. Disgraced among the enemy, in rags He was brought forth like a lamb to slaughter.22 12. Oblivious and uncaring, they raised [their] voices and cried As if singing a mocking song:23

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13. “Surely this is the day we have desired, To see with our eyes Jews suffering!” They snarled and barked.24 14. His flesh enmeshed in the heart of the flames, Remember, O Lord who dwells among the Cherubim, The day he came to sacrifice to you!25 15. O Earth! Do not cover his blood, May his fat and organs and flesh Go up as a savory offering. IV 16. A people without understanding attacked him, So he would reject his Creator,26 17. But his hands were stretched out to God, Whether he was distressed or at ease.27 18. Ephraim has been put to shame. For ten years he has been buried, Hidden away in a building like Noah.28 19. [They prepare?] fire in him like a flame on the threshing floor. Not until his hands greatly weaken Do they find him rest.29 20. O Earth! Do not cover his blood, May his fat and organs and flesh Go up as a savory offering. V 21. He was sold to strangers to lighten my sin. Like a violent man or murderer,30 22. Tied in chains, crowned like the Timnite’s bridegroom, So they could break his bones.31 23. They stewed his flesh in a furnace of affliction, They invented lies to increase my shame, On the cross of their murderous father.32 24. May God remember on our behalf, How he [Samson] made his offering to cleanse [our] sin, When I make offering in the House of the Lord to glorify [Him].33

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25. O Earth! Do not cover his blood, May his fat and organs and flesh Go up as a savory offering. I, Benjamin the Scribe, the writer of this maខhzor, composed this poem for the martyr Samson. ❖

❖

❖

Perhaps the first thing that will strike the student of medieval Hebrew literature about Benjamin’s poem is its form. An acrostic woven through the stanza bodies spells out “Samson.” As Doniach noted, a second acrostic, threaded through the refrain verses, spells out hjt—“my brother”— reinforcing the impression of a real bond between poet and victim. The acrostic is a standard device of Hebrew liturgical poetry and found ubiquitously in hymns from the Byzantine East to Spain. Nonetheless, in rhyme, (faulty) meter, and stanzaic construction, Benjamin the Scribe’s lament clearly invokes the strophic lyrics associated with Hebrew writing from tenth to twelfth-century Spain. As we have already seen in the preceding two chapters, the martyrological laments testify that poetic models from the “Golden Age” of Spanish Hebrew poetry made their way into northern France and Germany, where they held a special attraction for the Tosafist poets. In addition to Benjamin the Scribe’s lament, the poem by Solomon Simhah ខ (another scribe, in fact) for the martyrs of Troyes burned in 1288 is also strophic in form. So, too, many of the persecution laments of Meir b. Elijah of Norwich show Sephardic influence; these, too, were written prior to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, probably in the 1270s.34 Thus Benjamin was working in the height of martyrological fashion when he chose the type of verse he did to commemorate his friend. The form of Benjamin’s lament thus raises cross-cultural questions beyond those that concern relations between local Christians and Jews. The appearance in Christian Europe of Hebrew strophic poetry with quantitative meters—meters that made sense when heard in Hebrew accented like Arabic and not in the syllabic stress patterns of romance languages— asks us to think also about the relations between the two Jewish cultures represented by “Ashkenaz” and “Sepharad.”35 Northern French and Rhenish poets had attempted to imitate Sephardic lyric forms as early as the mid–twelfth century, as seen in the penitential hymns of Ephraim of Regensberg and even in a poem by Rabbenu Jacob Tam of Troyes.36 They must have sung them to their own melodies, which accounts in part for their erratic use of quantitative meters. Yet northern admiration for the Spanish style is apparent in the absorption of these forms into the liturgy:

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It suggests that the educated scholar-rabbis of France and Germany were more open to cultural innovation than has been thought.37 The strophic form of Benjamin’s lament had another more practical virtue, too. Because it was constructed as stanzas with a refrain, Benjamin’s poem could be sung in the synagogue, with a soloist performing the verses and the congregation joining in the refrain. Indeed, the last verse of the last stanza (v. 24) tells us that the lament was to be performed in public, “in the House of the Lord.” The verse’s echoes of Isa. 1:18 are penitential, a key to the liturgical context in which that performance took place. Allusion to biblical phrases that evoked rich exegetical traditions was a special feature of medieval Hebrew poetry, one that the martyrological poets put to honed use. Yet because they have privileged narrative meaning, scholars have overlooked the rich and clever ways by which poets like Benjamin, with spare language and often under complex formal constraints, could embed historical details as well as ethical, theological, and polemic commentary in evocative tableaux.38 The first third of the refrain (“O earth, do not cover my blood”) provides a good example. Medieval listeners would have attached this phrase from Job 16:18 to the preceding biblical verse as well: “For I have committed no violence and my prayer is pure” (Job 16:17). The twelfth-century exegete R. Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (“Rashi”), explained this biblical verse to mean: “I did not curse my companion nor did I accuse him of evil.” For literate Jews, therefore, the terse opening of the refrain referred to an innocent man falsely accused, who nonetheless maintained his innocence and did not implicate others. The rest of the refrain links the sacrifice of the martyr to the ritual sacrifices of the biblical cult, emphasizing the purity of the victim whose death is an offering to God. Since the time of the First Crusade, the Temple cult had provided Jewish martyrological poets with a way of memorializing violence in the language of ritual purity. Routinely, victims of First Crusade violence were described as sacrificial offerings, and later poets continued to rely on this convention to convey the suicide martyrdoms of Jews in the face of mob assaults. As we saw in the first chapter, the imagery of cultic purity was also enlisted to charge representations of sacred Christian symbols and sacraments with associations of ritual pollution; this imagery was extended particularly to representations of baptism. Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the use of cultic motifs in the martyrological poetry subtly revised its focus. In part, this revision reflects the historical shift in the nature of anti-Jewish persecution, which between the Second Crusade (1146–47) and the Rindfleisch massacres (1298) was more likely to be judicially sponsored than a matter of mob attacks. It also reflects a change in Jewish response to persecution, one documented in some of the other conventions we have discussed in the preceding chapters. In

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the commemorative poetry written after the first two Crusades, martyrdom was an enactment of mass sacrifice, in which designated “priests” (men and women ) slaughtered their families or students and then themselves. For instance, in a poem by David bar Meshullam commemorating First Crusade victims in Germany: Yearling lambs without blemish were slaughtered like whole offerings Trapped and burned like the sacrificial portions of shared offerings. They said to their mothers: Do not be moved by pity. Heaven has summoned us to be an offering by fire to the Lord.39 Or, from the same poem, Priestly servants authorized women [to act] like men. They make sacrifices and offerings, [perform acts of] slaughter, sprinkling and receiving blood.40 In contrast, by the mid–thirteenth century, martyrdom is depicted as a personal gesture, often described in the first person by the sacrificial victim. Thus Solomon b. Simhah’s ខ lament for the Troyes martyrs (1288) includes three martyrological vignettes in which the martyrs proclaim their readiness to offer various limbs and organs to God. Their language is reminiscent of Benjamin’s refrain. For instance, To please [God], I have arranged my affairs. I bow on my knee to confess my transgressions; To illumine my darkness, I offer my head and my face, My hands and my feet, for in Him is my Source. I shall make my libation with blood and tears. On the fiery altar, my heart is laid out, my soul [life] is my offering.41 The same motif is evident in Benjamin’s refrain, which concentrates on the personal offering of the victim, who, sinless himself, atones for others with his death. Here, too, a literary image links our poet and his audience to a general cultural preoccupation with bodily fragmentation.42 But in a specifically Jewish sense the refrain also reinforces the imagery of cultic purity that harmonizes the language of martyrdom with a major liturgical theme. The shift in focus from acts of multiple sacrifice in which adults slaughter loved ones to a personal gesture of self-offering is also marked in our poem by allusions in vv. 7, 8, 11 to Ezekiel. Here again, it is not a literal reading of the lament’s verses but their biblical overtones that create meaning. As we saw in the second chapter’s treatment of the Blois laments, earlier depictions of the auto-da-f´e often drew on biblical allusions to Sinai, both as the site of divine revelation and the gift of God’s cove-

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nant with Israel. The language of Sinai confirmed the innocence of God’s chosen and God’s awareness of their suffering, while transforming the devastating sight of the pyre from a symbol of defeat to one of public reaffirmation. Like a canopy, medieval Jewish martyrology extended over the terrible contradiction embodied (quite literally) in the image of the martyr: Just as the poetry transformed the martyr’s public humiliation into a witness to God’s presence, so too this literature addressed the contradiction between the degraded social status of the Jews and their theological claim to divine election. By the mid–thirteenth century, this convention, too, had evolved. In chapter 1, I claimed that this was particularly evident in depictions of martyrs broken on the wheel, whose deaths are described in more intimate language, often drawn from the book of Ezekiel.43 But later fire martyrs, too, emblematize personal offering and transfiguration more than collective revelation or renewal.44 In keeping with trends in the larger culture, Jewish martyrs are rendered with greater pathos; more attention is paid to the scene of death and to the victims’ physical suffering. In Benjamin’s lament, the echoes of Ezekiel, with all that prophet’s idiosyncratic fixations on the body and cultic impurity, construct a personal and poignant representation of Samson’s agonizing end. The allusions (to Ezek. 10:13 in v. 7, Ezek. 2:10 in v. 8, and Ezek. 32:25 in v. 11) all focus on the scene of the martyr’s passion. Samson is brought forth in rags (v. 11), broken on the wheel and tortured with coals (v. 7), then burned while a crowd of onlookers chants hymns or dirges (v. 8). As he burns, Samson’s bonds dissolve and he lifts up his hands and cries out (v. 8). If the poet is accurate, Samson was subjected to an amplified or compound sentence of execution—once by the wheel and once again by burning.45 While this was not the rule, the practice is documented. Breaking by (or on) the wheel was occasionally augmented by supplementary tortures such as the application of red-hot tongs (perhaps indicated by verse 7’s reference to hot coals) or decapitation and burning.46 If Samson was sentenced to a form of “cumulative” execution combining the wheel and the stake, his conviction was a serious matter indeed, and designed to make a strong impression on the crowd. The poem twice indicates Samson raising his (broken?) arms in prayer. This too may be a topos, or it may represent the grotesque flapping of Samson’s appendages as he burned.47 Whatever the case, the meaning of the poetic text is about more than its splintered or even distorted reflection of medieval judicial process and punishment.48 The point is not Benjamin’s inadequate representation of Samson’s trial and execution. The burning and broken man praying in the flames pays a distorted but clear homage to a century-old icono-

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graphic convention depicting the martyr alive and speaking from the flames, a convention whose emergence was treated in detail in chapter 2. This iconographic tradition derives ultimately from the description of Hananel, Misael, and Azariah in the fiery furnace of the book of Daniel. The motif revived after centuries of dormancy in the legends and laments for the martyrs of Blois, burned in 1171 following a blood libel. Other fragmented elements of the narrative of trial and execution make their way into Benjamin’s text, but they, too, are a poet’s selection. Thus, for instance, Benjamin’s reference to singing onlookers at Samson’s execution (v. 8), or to an oath sworn on a staff or cross (v. 23), are details that we would love to explain. As for the former, extrapolating from what is known of execution procedures in the early modern period, some kind of singing or chanting by onlookers likely accompanied Samson’s death. The songs, usually hymns (perhaps psalms), imposed liturgical decorum on what might otherwise have threatened to become an unruly scene.49 The evidence for musical performance must be set against the ubiquitous (Christian and Jewish) literary convention depicting the martyr’s singing as she or he dies. The victims probably did cry out, but their chanted and agonized proclamations of faith were not made to a silent crowd. They may even have sounded in counterpoint to an officially scripted liturgy. Similarly, allusions to oath-taking form an ominous subtext in “Take your stand.” In verse 6, the poet refers to iniquitous backsliders, “the nation that speaks lies.” The phrasing welds together the first two words of Isa. 5:18 (iuugv-hfaun) with a single word (ohduxb) used in Jer. 46:5 and Zeph. 1:6. Zephaniah proclaims God’s wrath with the “idolatrous priests” who worship “the host of Heaven—those who bow down and swear to the Lord and then swear by the god Milcom, Israelites who have turned back [ohduxbv] from following the Lord [Zeph. 1:4–6, following the RSV].” The late thirteenth-century French Jew read this passage through the lens of Rashi, who understood it to refer to those who swear an oath in God’s name and then in the name of another god, “making the false god the one that matters, saying, if you do not believe in an oath to God, here I will swear to you by a false one.” Likewise, Benjamin’s verse 23 refers explicitly to false oaths, alluding to 2 Kings 17:9, a biblical passage that describes Israelite defection to worship “other gods”: They stewed his flesh in a furnace of affliction They invented lies to increase my shame On the cross [or staff] of their murderous father. Samson has been convicted by false testimony, and Benjamin’s invective suggests that converted Jews were perhaps involved in sealing his

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fate. Since a significant number of Metz Jews may have converted (one explanation for the community’s disappearance midcentury), this is in fact possible. An astounding expression closes the verse, be’eខz avihem hameraខzzខ eaខh. Oaths taken on crosses are attested but not common. The word ‘eខz (literally, “wood” or “tree”) may refer as well to a staff.50 Alternatively, it may also be a truncated form for ‘eខzah, meaning “advice” or “counsel,” implying Samson’s conviction by a clerical authority—a “father.”51 This reading would play off the contrary appearance in verse 3 of the elongated form ‘eខzah for the anticipated ‘eខz, this time meaning “wood.” Benjamin may even have intended his wording to be ambiguous, so that the dual meanings of “cross” and “counsel” would simultaneously evoke a detested faith and the authority of its bishop or priests. The description of “barking” onlookers may also refer to the Dominican friars, whose presence in Metz is documented for the years 1216–20, and also in the tragic anti-Jewish libel in Valr´eas in 1247.52 According to the poem, Samson was incarcerated for “ten years” (v. 18), perhaps an approximate figure, before he was executed. Benjamin alludes to the ragged state of the rabbi when brought forth to die (v. 11). He also raises the specter of the prophet Jeremiah, detained in a cistern at the insistence of local princes and against the will of the king (Jer. 38:7– 13). Here, too, we may deduce that local tensions and disagreements played a role in Samson’s fate. Again, echoes of deceit and double-crossing constitute a leitmotif in the lament, expressed either overtly or in calculated allusions to biblical passages and scenes. Without supplying any real “facts,” Benjamin makes clear that the episode involved the treachery of men whose word should have been trustworthy but who instead delivered Samson to death. At the center of this lost narrative stands the martyr Samson, a “righteous man whom they terrorized” (v. 3) and whose innocence inspired his fellow Jews to hope that his death would atone for their own spiritual failings (v. 24). Yet Samson, we cannot avoid noticing, was attacked by his enemies “because he was forced” (’al asher ne’enas). The man or woman who was “forced” or “compelled” had typically submitted to forced baptism and hence conversion. Here we face a real dilemma: Had Samson converted? If so, we might have an explanation for his long imprisonment, which may have been designed to achieve this end. And if, after years in prison, Samson in a moment of weakness agreed to convert, then he may have repented of his decision and denied it later.53 Someone (someone he did not expect to do so) may have informed the priests or friars that his conversion was insincere. By that point, however, Samson was by Christian law a Christian, and his repudiation of his new faith was an act of heresy punishable by execution at the stake. I know of no other martyrological lament that honors the memory of a

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Jew who submitted to baptism. Three laments for the 180 martyrs of Frankfurt killed in 1241 include brief but poignant references to “captives,” meaning the twenty-four Jewish men and women who accepted baptism to save their lives. As a general rule, however, indecision and wavering, along with other signs of human fallibility, are subjects raised in prose but not in verse. This silence may reflect the poetry’s use in the synagogue, where the emphasis on the purity of the martyrs was linked to their efficacy as intercessors for the community. At the same time, of course, the idealized narrative of martyrdom compresses the range of responses to anti-Jewish violence to highlight only the victim’s choice of death over conversion. In real life, escape or submission to baptism, sometimes followed by a return to Judaism, accounted for alternative responses as well. If the conventions of the poetry—and the ideological requirements of the genre—do not admit to these options, the listeners must nonetheless have included men and women who had known or experienced them. In many cases, forced converts were the only victims of anti-Jewish attacks to survive as eyewitnesses, an irony noted recently in discussions of the prose narratives describing First Crusade violence.54 The cultural scenario of martyrdom, as the laments analyzed in other chapters demonstrate as well, embraces a number of cultural contradictions.55 The idealization of martyrdom for an audience imperfectly prepared to act on that ideal (which contradicts its natural desire for survival) is linked inextricably to attitudes toward purity and defilement. According to Jewish law, the terrible disfigurement, execution, and unburial of the martyr violated a number of ritual taboos, all of which the poetry reverses with cultic language and imagery. As already noted, this poetry addressed a contradiction experienced daily by these medieval Jews and reinforced by the symbols of a dominant Christian culture, namely the disjunction between the degraded appearance of Jewish conditions and the theological necessity of affirming Jewish claims to divine chosenness and protection. Finally, the poetry elevated a cultural type as the ideal martyr, who was generally male and a member of a social elite. At the same time, the ideal martyr had to serve as an “Everyman” figure who would appeal to male and female Jews of varying educational and social backgrounds. The unimpeachable bravery of the martyr also reflects a strategic choice by authors who understood the appeal of a bold heroic ideal to the young scholars and students most able to decipher the texts of the poems. In chapter 1, I argued that martyrological laments often targeted an audience the poet-rabbis felt acutely vulnerable to conversionary efforts—their adolescent and young adult students. Young men absorbed in rabbinic texts and study from an early age, they were also exposed to a

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wide variety of contacts with the Christian world. We know from the story of Herman the Jew that such young students were often engaged in family business pursuits that involved travels to Christian settings. There, they might develop cordial relationships with men of the court and the cloth. At times, as with Herman, the result was the young man’s conversion.56 The twelfth century also saw a high level of intellectual exchange between educated Christians and Jews, attested by the spirited disputation literature generated by men of both faiths, and by the exegetical methods emerging from the schools of Rashi and the Victorines.57 By the thirteenth century, as discussed in chapter 3, the situation of the Jews had deteriorated.58 In northern France, royal and ecclesiastical policies converged in an escalation of pressures on Jewish communities, with the ultimate aim of conversion. And throughout this period, and in addition to the coerced baptisms that accompanied mob attacks and judicial terror, Jews converted. Indeed, not all were convinced to do so by the sword. The omnipresent signs of Christian flourishing and triumph lay before their eyes, and for medieval eyes those signs held a kind of truth it was hard to contest. In addition, the sheer difficulty of day-to-day life must have had a persuasive force of its own. While statistics are hard to come by, it would seem that what we would today call “adolescent conversion” was a medieval problem as well as a modern one. Surely the emotional volatility and fervor associated with young manhood, in the midst of a culture that valorized deeds of prowess and devotion, made it harder for young men to accept daily humiliations as an alternative to the real temptations of Christian society. In this context, the figure of the ideal martyr as it evolved in the poetry had a number of aims. Clearly, the poems, designated for penitential liturgies, commemorated the victims of anti-Jewish violence. But we have seen that the martyr, especially in poetry, was most often described as a scholar, a man of learning, wealth, and family who gave up these attachments as well as his life in a gesture of love for God. This heroic—let us even say romantic—figure was designed to capture the imagination of precisely those young listeners who could decipher the textual allusions that rendered the martyr with depth. At the same time, as we have also seen, a vitriolic polemic reinforced the martyr’s defiance. This polemic relied on the representation of sacred Christian symbols in vivid images of pollution and filth, imagery I believe was also designed for this particular audience. Where subtle theological reasoning failed, visceral revulsion for Christianity might bolster Jewish ranks. If anything, these literary conventions hardened over the thirteenth century, as the figures for Jewish attrition increased to peak at midcentury then wane. Martyrological poetry, as already noted, acknowledged no weakness on the part of the martyrs.59 In unforgettable images, the poetry

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erected a barrier of steel between the world of Christian and Jew. One corollary of this oppositional perspective is the revulsion that attaches to figures who cross the lines—“informers” and apostates in particular. (Both, of course, caused real damage to Jewish property and lives. My point is that in the literature, they are also liminal figures, as for instance are Jewish women taken captive by Christians and later released. All of these figures are defiled in terms of ritual purity.) Literary contempt for the apostate extended to the forcibly baptized, whose failure to resist pollution tainted them as survivors. The problem of the apostate remained theologically, legally, and socially linked to the problem of the reverted Jew, whose baptism was by Jewish law without efficacy but by Christian law ineradicable.60 The legal literature is full of cautious rulings to regulate the reentry of the reverted Jew to communal life, acknowledging the distinction between outright defection and the less than neutral conditions under which “voluntary” conversion often took place. The ethical literature also contains tales of the repentance of apostates and of the uneasy blend of suspicion and relief that greeted their return.61 Thus, unless Benjamin was making a gesture of sheer audacity, his poetic testimony permits us to draw some tentative conclusions. It would be foolhardy to sound them with conviction, as in the end we are dealing with a single poem. But, if I am right and Benjamin’s lament commemorates a fellow Jew who weakened and converted, it is both an exceptional tribute to a friend and a comment on a changing social reality. As far as Benjamin was concerned, Samson was not merely his friend, but a Jew. The scribe’s lyrical insistence on this point must have reverberated deeply among his audience. It asks us also to think about this unusual poetic statement in the context of Jewish communities fractured and weakened by brutal economic and social policies, worn out by daily humiliation, prey to physical violence and despair. If the more fully documented case of England is any indication, the scattered evidence of internal dissension among Jewish authorities is accompanied by indications among the laity of broken families, destitution, and conversion that testifies more to desperation than to desire.62 But the conversion rate has peaked. And this is the interesting part. For Benjamin’s lament for Samson is written and conserved as the rulers of France and England and Germany are deciding that their attempts to convert the Jews have failed. A series of major expulsions—Anjou and Maine in 1286, Gascony in 1287, England in 1290, Nevers in 1294, royal France in 1306—lay around the corner.63 Jordan has estimated that by 1297, 76 percent of the Jews living in Paris—Benjamin the Scribe’s home territory—had not been “taxable heads of households” six years prior, implying that in the interim period they had arrived from somewhere else, victims of persecution and expulsion but unyielding to pres-

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sure to convert.64 In other words, Jews were suffering, but they were stubbornly remaining Jews. Benjamin’s lament testifies to some recognition among Jewish communities that with respect to conversion the tide had been turned. The legal literature should be examined on this point, but I wonder whether such recognition would not have been accompanied by a corollary rapprochement with the forcibly baptized seeking to return. Perhaps the desperation that had driven them to conversion was more widely endured and acknowledged. Perhaps it was equally obvious that Christian society had failed to absorb these unwilling converts into the fabric of Christian life. Surrounded by survivors of other local persecutions who recounted tales of heroic resistance even among the forcibly baptized, Benjamin moreover may have understood he had a sympathetic audience for his grief. In fact, we will never know what happened to bring Samson to his awful end, and that is unlikely to make historians happy. But I like to think that Benjamin has told us a great deal. His poem makes “sense” (literary if not documentary) in a context of relentless pressure on weakened Jewish communities who nonetheless succeeded in thwarting the chief ambition of that pressure—to achieve their conversion. Benjamin reveals to us a world in which, notwithstanding thirty-five years of attacks on rabbinic learning and books in royal France, a small class of male Jews continued to communicate with each other in a language that depended on common access to texts and common training in traditions of reading them. By offering his lament as a part of a penitential liturgy, he also tells us that even the men and women who could not fully understand what his poem meant were willing to participate in the commemorative rites that contained it. He describes the concentration of conversionary efforts on local Jewish leaders, and in heartbreaking terms, he preserves the uneven but determined resistance of Samson of Metz. Samson was a real-life person. But as a martyr in a poem, he also became part of a larger imaginative universe in which the idealized martyr was a key organizing symbol and in which liturgical poetry enacted the “therapeutic role of religious despair.”65 Indeed, as Peter Kaufman has argued in the case of early Protestants, here, too, prayer must have “shaped worshipers as well as worship.”66 The image of the martyr also helped to shape those who lived with him (and sometimes her), not only in poetry but as we can see in illuminations and liturgies, music and ritual, sumptuary restrictions and fast-days, hallowed spaces and objects as well as language. For those who were trained to see the world in texts, the texts could speak in resonant ways, creating chordlike overtones of meanings upon meanings, a symphonic polemic in which persecution and death, especially death one might have possibly escaped, could be af-

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firmed in the language of truth and desire. For those who read less, a panoply of symbols and symbolic behaviors awaited, fast-day rituals, graveside pilgrimages, stirring music, and the bloodstained memories of loved ones slain in terrible love for God’s unique Name. Thus was the poetry of martyrdom less a narrative than an experience, before which Jewish men, women, and children might well tremble, being less perfect than the holy martyrs whose images they revered, but whose choices they might themselves one day face in the purity of the fire. Nonetheless, and finally, martyrdom was not the consuming preoccupation of a Jewish world obsessed with suffering and death. Benjamin the Scribe gathered nine metrical poems together to insert into his maខhzor, and his lament for Samson is the seventh. The first six poems, by various authors, are Sabbath hymns also found in the Mahzor ខ Vitry, the great liturgical compendium of northern French medieval Jews. The seventh is Benjamin’s own composition and it is followed by a silly drinking poem for use on Purim, and then a hymn for the Great Sabbath before Passover.67 What better illustration that medieval French Jews, like all people then and now, lived in a whole world. The liturgy reflects the normal rhythms of that world, a daily rhythm of routine and worship that echoed the intersections of the profane with the holy. Occasionally, moments of sorrow, like moments of joy, might pierce and transfigure quotidian experience. Those moments were marked by rituals and liturgies and poetry. Even in the shadow of persecution, they interrupted what we must call normal life, and the heroes of the poetry reflect both consciously and unconsciously how complex that life could be. The next chapter, which treats a handful of laments commemorating the burning of thirteen Jews in Troyes in 1288, picks up from this concluding observation. For this remarkable set of poems not only applauds the determined resistance of its heroes, but acknowledges as well—unconsciously at times—their deep immersion in the world that they must stubbornly resist.

Notes The methodological issues raised in this chapter have benefited from discussions with other fellows at the National Humanities Center, in particular Stuart Clark, Susan Langdon, Sherry Ortner, Bernard Reginster, and Marjorie Woods. The idea for a chapter dedicated to a single poem is John van Engen’s, whose encouragement I have greatly appreciated, both at the Davis Center in the fall of 1999 and after. 1. It would not become French until the sixteenth century. See Mendel, 1979. 2. The full reference to the codex is British Library Additional MS. 11,639. See Doniach, p. 84; George Margoliouth, 1906; Jordan, 1984.

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3. In this category I include Miri Rubin’s study of Christian accusations of Jewish host desecrations and Jewish commemorative responses to the violence that the accusations engendered, Ivan Marcus’s study of the ritual initiation of Jewish schoolboys as an anti-eucharistic ceremony, and Jeremy Cohen’s readings of the First Crusade chronicles. See Rubin, 1999; Ivan Marcus, 1996; Jeremy Cohen, 1994. 4. Recall Clifford Geertz’s classic formulation: Where outside observers experience religious performances only as “presentations of a particular religious perspective, and thus aesthetically appreciated or scientifically dissected, for participants they are in addition enactments, materializations, realizations of it—not only models of what to believe but also models for the believing of it. In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as they portray it.” Thus, religious beliefs, communicated in ritual performance, “are also a template. They do not merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms. . . . but they shape them.” Geertz, pp. 29 and 40–41. 5. Ivan Marcus has noted the undertreated status of medieval Jewish ritual, although primarily in the context of his treatment of a nontextual ritual. See Marcus, 1996, introduction. I am pressing here for an emphasis on the ritual and performative aspects of liturgical texts that have been to date treated exclusively, when they have been treated at all, as texts. For a tantalizing exception, see Wachtel. See also Tambiah. As for the musical features of the texts, some of these are obviously indicated in the visual format of the text, occasionally augmented by instructions for the use of a refrain or a melody borrowed from a preexisting hymn. In rare cases, melodies have survived, but they are chiefly Ashkenazic (i.e., German); the French musical tradition seems to have been lost. Neither the musicologist Professor Eli Schliefer of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem nor cantorial members of the Hebrew Union College’s cantorial faculty in New York knew of any verifiably medieval French melodies. I discuss other sorts of dramatic gestures in chapter 6. 6. I am thinking of the formulation in Sherry Ortner’s 1973 study. Ortner described two major types of cultural symbols, which she calls “summarizing” and “elaborating.” Summarizing symbols, which include most sacred symbols, “are those symbols which are seen as summing up, expressing, representing for the participants in an emotionally powerful and relatively undifferentiated way, what the system means to them” (1339). Thus, the summarizing symbol speaks to a “broader context of attitude within which particular modes of thinking and action are formulated” (1343a), so that “many other cultural ideas and attitudes presuppose, and make sense only in the context of, those meanings formulated by the symbol” (1343b). I believe that the figure of the martyr in medieval northern France and Ashkenaz fits this category. Ortner’s later work develops the related notion of the “key scenario,” or “scheme,” defined as “standardized plot structures that appear in stories and rituals” and that programmatically stage resolutions to cultural contradictions that threaten the traditional balance of a society. She relates this notion to Victor Turner’s concept of a “root paradigm” in religious tradition. See Ortner, 1989, pp. 60 and 196. 7. Doniach, pp. 84–91; Neubauer, 1882–83. 8. “Nakdimon Doniach,” obituary by Tudor Parfitt, in the Independent, Satur-

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day, April 23, 1994; “Birthday Celebration for Naky Doniach O.B.E.,” eds. Cigman and Howlett. My thanks to David Patterson for providing the latter pamphlet, and to Tudor Parfitt, via William Jordan, for a copy of the obituary. See also the Encyclopedia Judaica entry under “Doniach, Nakdimon.” 9. Compare William Jordan’s recent characterization (2000, p. 9) of Wissenschaft scholarship as a method that stressed “careful research in archives,” “objectivity,” and “transparent prose style.” Thus, “Jewish scholars . . . were first encouraged to find texts in obscure places and to edit or inventory them in order to make their contents accessible to other scholars.” 10. Doniach, pp. 86–87. 11. Jordan, 1989, p. 219. 12. I have compared and occasionally emended Doniach’s and Neubauer’s transcriptions against a very poor microfilm copy of the text. The translation is my own. 13. Each half of the versicle refers to a biblical verse, here Isa. 22:7 and Zeph. 1:14. 14. The first half of the versicle comes from Jer. 6:7, also evoking Isa. 19:5; the second half draws on Job 25:5. The meaning of the line remains obscure, especially the second half, with its jrh khvth sg. Both Rashi and modern scholars understand ‘ad to be related to the verbal form in Job 28:8, where it means “to move or pass over.” Ya’ahil in Job 25:5 means “to grow bright,” as Rashi and Nahmanides also read it. I have translated on the assumption that the verse halves are parallel, i.e., that the image of the well that can replenish itself is paralleled by a description of the moon that can replenish its brightness after waning. 15. Ps. 94:21; Jer. 6:6; the last third of the verse is a phrase used ubiquitously in biblical descriptions of sacrifices. 16. Ps. 62:4 ⳱ RSV 62:3; Eccles. 12:3 and Jon. 1:10. It is not clear how the last third of the verse is supposed to connect to the first two; I have treated it as if it completed the explanation of the tormentors’ contempt for Samson. The opening expression is charged, as the word I have translated as “forced” (ne’enas) can refer to forced conversion. See the discussion further on. 17. Job 16:18. 18. Isa. 5:18 and Zeph. 1:6. N.B. the context of the Zephaniah passage, which describes Israelites who pretend to worship God and other deities simultaneously. Radaq (David Qimhi ខ of Narbonne) and Rashi both elaborate at Zeph. 1:5 on the false oaths (that is, sworn in the name of alien gods) taken by the Israelites. Radaq comments further, “some say that they swear in the name of God and then go back and swear by the name of the bread of their priests.” 19. The first half of the versicle uses three different Hebrew words for “wheel.” See Ezek. 10:13, which contains two of them. In the second half of the versicle, jp can have several meanings: (1) “brimstone” or “glowing coals”; (2) a “snare” or “pit”; or (3) “[gold] plate.” Doniach translated, “Ils ajoutent . . . des pi`eges chauds encore du forgeron,” i.e., using the second meaning. I prefer the first meaning, perhaps evoking the proximity of nopeaខh and peខham in Isa. 54:16 [RSV: “Behold, I [God] have created the smith who blows the fire of coals and produces a weapon for its purpose / I have also created the ravager to destroy”] and notice Rashi there, who writes “I am He who prepares persecutions for him.”

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20. Ezek. 2:10; Micah 1:4; Jer. 4:31. 21. Cf. Ps. 42:2 ⳱ RSV 42:1; 1 Sam. 26:19. Doniach has transcribed (or the printer has printed) jf,xvk, which does not exist, but translated as jp,xvk, which he apparently intended. 22. Exod. 32:25; Jer. 38:11; Isa. 53:7. 23. “Oblivious and uncaring”—literally, “dreaming and lying down.” Doniach translated “`a leur aise.” However, both Rashi and Radaq emphasize the negligence implied in the “sleepiness” of the watchmen in Isa. 56:10, whence the expression derives. Radaq explicitly draws an analogy to the town leaders who should protect the people from danger but do not. “As if singing a mocking song”—cf. Ezek. 33:32, where Rashi interprets shir ‘agavim not in the common sense of “love song” but as s’ខhoq, a song of mockery. Doniach seems to have incorrectly transcribed the phrase as shir shavim, which makes no sense. For “They lifted their voices and cried,” see Isa. 42:11. 24. Lam. 2:16. 25. Cf. Exod. 3:2; Isa. 33:16. 26. Deut. 32:28; Gen. 49:23. Doniach has translated ‘im lo tevunah (“sans intelligence”) but the reading ‘am lo tevunah (a people without understanding) fits the pattern of Deut. 32:17–21. 27. The first part of the versicle combines expressions from Exod. 17:2 and Deut. 32:4. The image of Samson praying with his hands outstretched and aloft recurs throughout the poem. The second half of the versicle is not clear, and I follow Doniach’s “dans la d´etresse comme dans la paix.” 28. Cf. Hos. 10:6. 29. The first word of the versicle is unclear and seems to be corrected in a marginal addition, also unclear. Some form of the root k-w-n seems indicated, hence “prepare,” “erect” is possible. The second two-thirds of the line read literally “until his hands greatly weaken, they have found him no rest.” 30. Lev. 25:47, correcting Doniach’s kimkar la’aqor to nimkar le’eqar. For ish damim, cf. 2 Sam. 16:8, Ps. 5:7 ⳱ RSV 5:6. 31. Judg. 15:6—the Timnite’s bridegroom is, of course, Samson. For nikbal ba’aziqim, cf. Nah. 3:10, where the expression is rutqu baziqim but Rashi reads nikbelu for rutqu. “They invented lies”—2 Kings 17:9. For meraខzzខ eaខh (“murderous”) see 2 Kings 6:32 or Isa. 1:21, and see the discussion below. 32. “Furnace of affliction”—Isa. 48:10. The context, indicting the treachery of the Israelites, should be compared to the statements in versicles 4 and 6. 33. Cf. Isa. 1:18. 34. For the Troyes poem, see chapter 5, and on Meir of Norwich, see Einbinder, 2000. 35. As Dan Pagis noted, in Italian Hebrew poetry, the quantitative stress patterns would later evolve into a preference for the Western iambic. Here, too, the poets must have heard the Khalilian meters in ways influenced by their immersion in French- or German-speaking cultures. See Pagis. 36. Ephraim of Regensburg; Urbach, 1955, p. 94. 37. As Soloveitchik (1998) has observed, the territory in which Ashkenaz and French Jewish intellectuals were clearly most innovative was in the world of halakhah, or Jewish law. In contrast, they have not been considered overly flexible or

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open to change in other cultural forms of expression. Jeremy Cohen has recently argued that Jewish polemical literature in Spain also shows signs of influence from northern French and Ashkenaz polemical writing; see Jeremy Cohen, 1999. 38. As Tambiah notes (p. 132), “we should not commit the error that because most rituals are not concerned with transmitting new information they therefore lack any referential, propositional and analogical meanings at all.” 39. From “Elohim al domi ledami,” by David bar Meshullam. I cite from the translation of Carmi, p. 374. The full Hebrew text is in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 69–71. 40. Habermann, 1945a, pp. 69–71, vv. 41–42. My translation. 41. Solomon b. Simhah, ខ “Shahar ខ avi’ todah,” in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 2:825–26. Translation mine. This description is taken from stanza 4, but cf. also stanzas 7 and 8. 42. See Bynum, 1991, and the discussion in chapter 3. 43. As David Halperin (1993) has observed, the interest of later (male) readers in Ezekiel may also be related to Ezekiel’s obsessive concern with certain types of images (largely negative) of female sexuality. This does not negate my argument, as I would more or less apply Halperin’s poignant observations about modern readers of Ezekiel (see his conclusion, 224ff.) to the increasingly misogynistic readers of the thirteenth century. There may be some connection between the more introverted and body-centered focus of the later martyrological literature and its increasingly ambivalent portrayals of women. See Einbinder, 2000a. 44. This argument is developed more fully in the preceding chapter. 45. This may be a bigger “if” than most readers would like. Nonetheless, the martyrological poetry of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries supplies numerous examples of martyrological topoi that could not possibly describe historical reality. An obvious instance is found in First Crusade laments that describe parents sacrificing/killing their children (historically plausible) and then stacking their limbs on a sacrificial altar (impossible). More problematically, most female martyrs are depicted as married and often pregnant. The deaths of male martyrs may imitate in literary form aspects of the legend of the Ten Martyrs of the rabbinic period, or the martyrs may exhibit more contemporary traits, such as incombustibility, see chapters 3 and 4 below. Thus I consider the plausibility of Samson’s double execution, but I cannot confirm the accuracy of the poetic account. 46. D¨ulmen, p. 96. D¨ulmen treats execution in the early modern period. There is little documentation for the medieval period, but one may assume some continuity of practice. See also Esther Cohen, 1993; and Evans. 47. See Zimmer on the history of Jewish prayer gestures. The description of a martyr’s flapping arms is also preserved in a description of one of Foxe’s martyrs; see Berry, p. 213 (the story of Master John Hooper, burned in 1555). 48. This may sound obvious, but it has actually not been, and I am indebted to Stuart Clark for helping me to formulate this point. See Clark, p. viii. 49. According to Evans, in seventeenth-century Germany hymns were sung by schoolboys at executions, a practice that continued into the nineteenth century. “[A]fter the singing, the children would stay to watch the execution itself.” Evans, pp. 75–76. Note also the liturgical accompaniment to the medieval testing of relics for authenticity, a variation on the judicial ordeal by fire. As early as 978,

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Theodoric described this ritual ceremony, which included the chanting of the mass and a benediction; see Head, 2000a, p. 222, citing Theodoric of St. Eucharius, Inventio et miracula s. Celsi, cc. 22 and 24, p. 400. 50. Such a ceremony (using a staff) is attested in Germany; see Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 9, p. 207, “Oath, More Judaico.” For an oath sworn on a cross, James Brundage points to a series of references in Christian penitentials in which such an oath is at first considered sinful (Pseudo-Egbert 6.2, in Schmitz, Bussb¨ucher 2:666; Theodore 1.6.4 in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils 2:182) but eventually is not; see Gratian at C.22 q.5 c.2 and Johannes Teutonicus, Glos. ord. to C.22 q.5 c.2 v. consecrata. My thanks to Professor Brundage for these references (personal communication, 2000). See also Helmholz, pp. 150–51. 51. It is not however obvious that medieval Jews were aware that priests were called “father.” Nonetheless, they might have associated this title with a bishop, especially if they had heard the bishop so addressed during forced attendance at Christian penitential services. That they would have associated the title “father” with a regular priest is improbable, according to Richard Pfaff, private communication, May 5, 2000. 52. Molinier. 53. Such cases are known, and the whole issue of what constituted “forced” conversion was a hotly debated one throughout this period. For a detailed account, in his own words, of a vacillating convert, see the confession of Baruch the Jew published and analyzed by Grayzel, 1955b. See also the discussion in Yerushalmi, 1970. 54. Jeremy Cohen, 1994. 55. Again, I refer to Sherry Ortner’s concept of the key scenario or “structural schema,” which she defines as the “standardized plot structures that reappear in stories and rituals” and which “portray actors pressed by the contradictions of the structure, but finding ways to resolve them.” Ortner, 1989, p. 196. To analogize from Stuart Clark’s analysis of demonology, medieval Jewish martyrology (like early modern demonology) was a way of thinking that included not merely textual representations but conventional and ritual acts as well as conceptual models. Moreover, as a way of thinking, it relied on antitheses, the representation of Jewish symbols and beliefs as directly opposite to those espoused by Christianity. See Clark, esp. pp. 134–47. The danger implicit in this model, as Clark acknowledges, is that the “good” becomes utterly dependent upon recognition of its contrary—“the devil returns not merely to assist with the knowledge of God but as the best source of that knowledge” (137). Such a symmetrical opposition characterizes both Christian and Jewish representations of martyrdom. See also Scott. Ortner’s work also focuses on the importance of “structural contradiction”; see for instance Ortner, 1989, pp. 12–13. 56. An English translation of Herman’s wonderful autobiographical essay may be found in Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah and Constantine Tsatsos. As Ivan Marcus reminds me, the actual catalyst for Herman’s conversion was not an intellectual exchange but the forceful impression made upon him by nuns praying. As with any conversion experience, the moment of “turning,” especially as it is later positioned in the convert’s autobiographical narrative, is significant. Yet the road to that moment is

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generally a long one, and Herman’s autobiography is not exceptional in this regard. I am grateful to Ivan Marcus for the distinction, however; Marcus, private communication, September 8, 2000. Ephraim of Bonn mentions an incident in Shtulka, also in the mid–twelfth century, in which R. Alexander bar Moses, Abraham bar Samuel, and Qalonymos bar Mordecai are compelled “by royal decree” to return to Bachrach to check on outstanding debts. En route they are stopped by crusaders and killed when they refuse to convert. See Habermann, 1945a, p. 118. 57. See Signer, 1993; and I note gratefully the careful and illuminating study of my student Jonathan Blake, “Joseph Bekhor Shor of Orl´eans and Christian Polemic of the Middle Ages.” 58. David Berger, 1986; Jordan, 1989. 59. This is not true in the prose, which provides an interesting contrast in types. See for instance the exemplum of R. Amnon of Mainz, whose wavering costs him his life, or the story of Isaac the Parnas, a First Crusade martyr who underwent baptism then repented. The story of R. Amnon is found in Isaac of Vienna, Or Zaru’a, Hilkhot Rosh Hashanah, par. 276, and analyzed in detail in Ivan Marcus, 1994; the story of Isaac the Parnas is in the chronicle of Solomon bar Samson, in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 36–37. 60. See Yerushalmi, 1970; and Katz, 1958. 61. On Baruch’s troubles, see Grayzel, 1955b; Yerushalmi, 1970; Benedict of York was not permitted burial in a Jewish cemetery; see Dobson, 1974. See also the wonderful fable preserved in the Ma’aseh Buch and cited by Br¨ull, about Judah the Pious, who did not want to permit an apostate to return to the faith and was convinced by a miracle to do so. See Br¨ull. 62. Stacey, 1992, for the demographics. Meir of Norwich also alludes to the breakdown of consensus and authority; see Einbinder, 2000b. See also Shatzmiller, 1995; Simha Goldin, 1999; and my discussion in the following chapter. 63. Jordan, 1989, pp. 180–85. 64. Ibid., p. 183. 65. The quotation comes from Kaufman, p. 9. 66. Ibid., p. 23. The full citation is helpful, and I include it here. Kaufman argues eloquently that the Protestant sense of “self” emerged in part as a consequence of liturgical performance, so that “a broader perspective on the cultural dynamics of religious experience and expression shows that prayers were not just formulations of agents’ intentions or narrative traces of some psychodynamic process operating behind or beneath intention. Prayers shaped worshipers as well as worship.” 67. Margoliouth, Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts, p. 414, entry no. 1056, under Add. 11,639, see section 44 (ff. 533a–536b).

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APPENDIX

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FIVE UNE BELE QEDUSHAH: TROYES 1288 Why do You sleep? Awaken, O Lord Who makes the mute speak! My enemy has said that perhaps You are preoccupied And very lacking in power, without strength or might. As for me, what shall I say when I see You harden Your heart Against the son with the birthright, who like a conjurer speaks from the earth While privilege rests on the shoulders of the son who despised it? —Solomon Simhah ខ the Scribe

O

N APRIL 24, 1288, thirteen French Jews in Troyes joined the ranks of the qedoshim, the holy martyrs who died sanctifying God’s Name. Two were women, one of them pregnant. Of the eleven men, one was a child, burned with his brother, a newlywed whose bride was also among the victims. Atypically, several of the laments that describe the martyrdom refer explicitly to the presence of Dominican and Franciscan clerics who offered the Jews various inducements to convert. Judging from their deaths, the victims—even one who had earlier attempted to flee—died resolute in their faith. The five surviving laments for the Troyes martyrs provide one of the richest sets of poems for an incident of judicial martyrdom to survive the medieval period. Only the seven laments for the martyrs of Blois in 1171, the subject of chapter 2, come close to rivaling this collection. One of the Troyes laments is a unique example of a Jewish martyrological poem in Old French. All five poems, including the vernacular lament, are the work of three authors, Jacob bar Judah of Lorraine, Solomon Simhah ខ (or just “Simhah”) ខ the Scribe, and Meir ben Eliav.1 The happy survival of relevant tax records for the county of Champagne and a royal ordinance issued three weeks after the burning complete the documentary record for the incident. As with the incidents treated in the preceding chapters, that record raises questions. Why should this incident have shocked Jewish men and women who were already stunned by the relentless crush of secular and ecclesiastical persecution? Historians’ reconstruction of this period in the life of northern French Jews stresses the precariousness of Jewish existence relative to the earlier part of the century; as the pressure from without intensified, so too Jewish communal institutions showed signs of fracture and strain. Certainly the royal administration of Philip the IV

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(the “Fair”) was well schooled in the available methods (financial, physical, and psychological) it had inherited for intimidating its royal Jews. Most of these methods—like the mass arrest, or captio, or the various poll taxes, cancellations of debt, fees for the ubiquitous Jewish badge or for the seals that authorized loan payments—were nonexistent or still experimental at the time of the Blois incident in 1171. By now, too, the judicial prosecution of Jews, often linked to libel charges, was no longer a novel matter.2 How, then, do the poems that commemorate the Troyes martyrs shed light on Jewish response to these conditions? In this case, the documents permit a reasonable reconstruction of the tragedy. On March 26, Good Friday and the seventh day of Passover, the family of Isaac Chatelain, a prominent figure in the small Jewish community of Troyes, was seated at dinner when they were surprised by Christian visitors. The delegation was armed but not overtly hostile. However, according to one of the laments, the visitors deposited and then “discovered” a corpse (presumably a child’s) in the house. Isaac was accused of murder, and he, his family, and a number of other Troyes Jews were arrested. A few weeks later, on April 24, the thirteen Jews were burned. One of the Hebrew laments refers bitterly to the “house of Jacquemin” as the source of the trouble, an opinion reinforced by the Old French description of the “prechors” who confronted the victims at their “trial.” In addition to this reference to the Dominicans ( Jacobins, or “Jaquemins”), the same Hebrew lament mentions hខ ovlim (cord´eliers), so that there may also have been a Franciscan presence during the proceedings.3 Since the Troyes session of the king’s court did not meet until May 3 of that year, the Jews were tried and condemned by some other sort of judiciary process; the proximity of the execution to the Jours suggests there was some haste to conclude the matter before the king’s men could intervene. This sense is confirmed by a royal decree issued shortly afterward by Philip IV, prohibiting ecclesiastical prosecution of Jews.4 The church, in this scenario, becomes the compelling force behind the tragedy. And indeed, the church, especially armed with Inquisitorial powers, posed a distinct jurisdictional threat to the young king.5 This is not to imply that Philip on his own would have protected the victims. Even early in his reign the king was not known for liberal policies toward the Jews, and his ordinance, with its implicit rebuke to Renier de la Belle, the bailli of Troyes, coincides with the remanding of Jewish property and assets to the Crown.6 Five of the martyred Jews’ homes were repurchased by Jews in 1295, an indication that the incident had not utterly debilitated the surviving community. Nonetheless, the tragedy left its mark. As one scholar observed, it was in part “la v´en´eration qu’ils e´ prouvaient pour leurs martyrs” that impelled the survivors to regain their former houses, and the new owners must have tread lightly in such sanctified space.7

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Troyes, in the county of Champagne, was a special city in the history of medieval Jews. Home to the school of the revered rabbi and exegete, R. Solomon b. Isaac (“Rashi,” d.1105), it figured as a Jewish intellectual and cultural center long after his death. The city was a flourishing center of the Christian renaissance as well. The counts of Champagne were powerful lords whose bristly allegiance to the crown demanded constant reinforcement. Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the kings of France and the counts of Champagne used both carrot and stick—from marital alliances to sword point—to negotiate their ties. Because of Champagne’s independence of the Crown, Champagne Jews were spared some of the devastation of the royal domain’s harsh policies toward its Jews, and prior to 1284, there is evidence of a relatively prosperous Jewish community.8 In 1284 Philip IV married the heiress to Champagne, acquiring for himself its countship, and in the following year he assumed the throne.9 As far as the Jews were concerned, conditions deteriorated rapidly thereafter.10 Indeed, the relative novelty of royal presence may in part account for the multiple laments to mourn the victims of the 1288 martyrdom; as with the Blois incident more than a century earlier, the poets were responding to something perceptibly new in their experience. What was new, of course, was not the negative attitude of the crown (or the Church) to the Jews. The counts of Champagne had not exactly been noted for generosity toward their Jewish population. But in royal lands, the ambitious administrative reforms of Louis IX and Philip III had increasingly targeted Jewish conversion as a necessary step toward the formation of a unified Christian nation-state. Under Philip IV, the imperial image of France as a holy nation whose ruler was chosen by God would take even deeper root.11 The seeds of this notion lay in the attitudes and beliefs that had surrounded the young king since birth. A second son who became heir to the crown only shortly before his father’s death on crusade in Aragon, Philip IV was only sixteen when he ascended to the throne, and barely twenty when the Jews were burned in Troyes. The young king had inherited more than imperial vision and a dislike for his Jews. Philip III’s campaign in Aragon was a costly disaster that left the new ruler in serious debt, with conflicts abroad and on uncertain borders, as well as with the Church. Darmesteter believed that the causes for the tragedy in Troyes were adequately explained by the “religious fanaticism, hatred and envy” of Christian clerics, officials, and townspeople for the Jews in their midst. This interpretation, however, does not sit easily with the available facts. The documents he cites, from the early decades of the thirteenth century, emphasize the indebtedness of the abbey of St. Loup in Troyes to Jewish creditors.12 Yet the middle decades of the century dealt a blow to Jewish wealth, and conditions after 1284

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worsened quickly. As ruler of Champagne, Philip IV could press the Troyes Jews for funds as his father and grandfather could not. Surely he did that in the years between 1284 and 1288, and even if the counts of Champagne had already taught their Jews to expect heavy tallages, the weight of new pressure was now felt in new ways. In fact, the year 1288 marked several administrative changes that had a direct impact on royal Jews. In addition to an annual tithe imposed in 1285 and a confirmation of the order for Jews to wear a distinctive badge on their clothing, in 1288 the king authorized his government to regulate sale of the badge as well.13 In the same year, Philip reorganized the financial administration of Jewish affairs, delegating two officials, Jean l’Ane and Geoffrey Gornici, to collect outstanding loans.14 If the king was pressing on his Jews, the Jews were pressing on their clients for outstanding debts, engendering resentment and frustration as they did so. The presence of Italian bankers, and Philip’s inclination to rely on them, must have made the Jews’ position more vulnerable, a point perhaps observed by their foes. The receiver of Champagne, Renier Accorre, was an Italian financier first appointed by Count Henry III. Since Henry’s death in 1274, Accorre had had many years to build up local influence and connections of the sort Philip endeavored to reform. Records of a legal conflict between Renier and moneychangers from the Champagne fairs in 1282 are tantalizing not only because of the nature of the conflict but because the hearings were moved from the county Jours to the (royal) Parlement. Describing the administrative changes in the Champagne courts instituted by Philip IV, John Benton has speculated that the change of venue in this case may indicate that “the changers felt that Renier had too much influence in the county for them to receive a fair hearing in the Jours.”15 It may be that his professional propriety was in question by the time of the Troyes incident, as the records indicate that a second receiver was appointed to work with Accorre in 1287 and 1288.16 Disgraced for unknown reasons by the end of 1288, Renier Accorre was replaced by the Guidi brothers of the Franzesi firm. Albizzo (Biche) and Musciatto (Mouche) Guidi were already the receivers of Toulouse, and achieved “extraordinary financial powers” in coming years.17 Accorre was accused of impropriety in office, fined heavily, and condemned to prison.18 In short, neither Accorre nor local churchmen were likely to protect the king’s Jews. Why the bailli of Troyes did not do so is not clear. He is mentioned explicitly in the French poem, in addition to the mendicant preachers. In the context of what we know about Philip’s secular appointees, in particular the royal baillis and seneschals who were responsible for administering justice in his realm, Darmesteter’s assumption that the bailli of Troyes acted feebly in this case is unconvincing. Darmesteter cites the

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royal ordinance of May 17, 1288, issued three weeks following the execution and forbidding ecclesiastical prosecution of Jews, as evidence that the bailli of Troyes, Renier de la Belle, had capitulated to clerical pressure.19 Renier’s later career hardly suggests a man at a loss to assert the king’s will in tough situations; Philip would send him to take charge in Laon in the wake of an ugly riot in 1297 and in 1302–1304 we find him a frontier guard in Flanders.20 If Renier executed the thirteen Troyes Jews, he did not think it would greatly upset the king (and Philip would never be accused of overfondness for his Jews). It is too simple, in short, to declare that the murder charges against the Troyes Jews emerged out of undifferentiated envy and religious hatred among Christians. Conditions were in flux, and new stress lines were emerging. A new king—a young, new king—was being tested, and the Jews were vulnerable. The poems for the Troyes victims give some indication of changed conditions, and not merely because there are so many of them. On the one hand, each of the Troyes poets made a noteworthy effort to commemorate the tragedy by enlisting literary techniques and appealing to literary tastes shaped very much by wider cultural developments, testifying to how enmeshed Jewish and Christian lives remained. Jacob bar Judah, both in Old French and in Hebrew, drew on sacred and secular motifs to create martyrological vignettes that bear the stamp of romance hagiographical conventions. Meir ben Eliav attempted to create a narrative in verse, hearkening back to earlier Hebrew poetic narratives (for the Blois martyrs of 1171) but shaped by contemporary tastes as well. And Solomon Simhah ខ fashioned an unusual series of martyrological portraits that reflect the affective uses of violence in contemporary vernacular writing. On the other hand, although all five laments suggest the continuity of martyrological motifs in the literature we have been examining, some of these motifs have been adapted to suit a different social reality. The Troyes martyrs, even as a group, are no longer the agents of collective revelation; nor do they symbolize the reaffirmation of divine love. Rather, a model of Jewish faith is upheld in these laments so that their listeners might situate their own suffering in the penumbra of holy death that had befallen their elite. At the same time, the literature suggests a renewed determination to resist that is confirmed by the external indications that Jewish conversion had peaked by the 1260s, and as a royal policy was increasingly considered a failure. Eventually, this failure was a factor in the decision to expel the Jews from England in 1290 and again from royal France in 1306. Yet it would be a mistake of hindsight to view the force of Jewish resistance as inevitable; as I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, the attrition at its worst was significant, and as late as the 1260s to 1270s neither Jews nor Christians could have predicted that

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conversion as a policy would fail.21 By 1288, however, Jewish determination, even in the face of total collapse, should have been clear. Despite their rich commentary on an incident of historical significance, the five laments for the Troyes martyrs have received little scholarly attention. The most interesting are the Hebrew and Old French laments by Jacob bar Judah of Lorraine, preserved in a Vatican manuscript, which first saw modern light with Darmesteter’s two late nineteenth-century publications.22 Neither Darmesteter nor his early readers were overly impressed by the Hebrew lament as fine literature. Thus, for Renan, the Hebrew poem represented one of the least objectionable examples of an obscurantist genre, achieving a modicum of dignity only because “aux e´ poques de mauvais gouˆ t, on peut souvent eˆ tre a` la fois touchant et pu´eril.”23 For both men, the vernacular poem held greater value, particularly as their own intellectual milieu valued vernacular expression as a sign of emerging national consciousness and identity. Darmesteter contrasted the use of the vernacular with the artifice of literary Hebrew, concluding that “la simplicit´e, la grandeur, la sobri´et´e qui le caract´erisent forment un singulier contraste avec l’aff´eterie de la pi`ece h´ebra¨ıque.”24 Without this preconception in favor of the “natural” superiority of the vernacular, the pair of laments offers us a rare glimpse of a single poet writing under the constraints of two different sets of conventions. The remaining Hebrew laments give us a wider exposure to the range of Hebrew conventions. In addition to Jacob bar Judah’s laments, Darmesteter’s 1881 article included transcriptions of two other liturgical elegies for the Troyes martyrs. He prefaced Meir ben Eliav’s lament, “Ez’aq hខ amas” (I Cry Out over the Violence) with the remark that it was “d’une valeur litt´eraire bien inf´erieure” but useful for its historical detail.25 In fact, Meir’s poem, if lacking in lyric achievement, illustrates an interest in portraiture and dramatic narration that is unusual in martyrological verse. Like Jacob bar Judah, Meir uses traditional quatrains to devise a series of tableaux, some extended over a number of stanzas to form small poetic narratives. Darmesteter also published an unusual lament, “Shaខhar avi’ todah” (At Dawn I Shall Bring an Offering) by Solomon Simhah ខ the Scribe, which he thought noteworthy for its “obscurity.” The critique overlooks both the striking formal features of Solomon’s poem and its startling imagery. In fact, “Shaខhar avi’ todah” is the work of a curious figure in Jewish intellectual history. Solomon b. Simhah ខ b. Eleazar of Troyes was a descendant of the great Rashi, and the author of a unique scientifictheological treatise he called the Sefer haMaskil. As Ta-Shma estimates his date of birth around 1235, he would have been (unlike many of our other martyrological poets) a mature man in 1288; the Sefer haMaskil was composed in the 1290s.26 According to Solomon’s own testimony,

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his radical interpretations of Scripture as well as his peculiar theology (according to which, among other things, God’s presence filled the universe in the form of a divine ether) did not earn him popularity or acclaim.27 The eccentricity of his philosophy, which veered perilously close to sun worship, is reflected in the unusual features of his lament for the Troyes martyrs. It seems more than likely that Solomon, who lived in Troyes, witnessed some of the terrible events he describes. Although its graphic images of human dismemberment and sacrifice are (to us) bizarre, Solomon’s lament offers much to our discussion. Despite his idiosyncracies, the author, who had studied with Meir of Rothenburg and Pereខz b. Elijah of Corbeil, exemplifies the degree to which mystical teachings associated with the German Pietists had infiltrated Tosafist thought.28 Moreover, the balladlike structure of the lament, which is composed of nine stanzas of nine lines plus a refrain line, reflects familiarity with either the forms of strophic composition popular in vernacular lyric or in Hebrew poetry from Spain.29 The Tosafist poets, as we have seen in earlier chapters, were interested in the “new” styles of Hebrew poetry from Spain, and this lament seems a baroque, semimystical elaboration of earlier models. Solomon mentions only half of the martyrs by name, which led Darmesteter to believe the poet had limited access to information about the event. However, Solomon’s poem includes a number of details not found elsewhere, and his focus on particular martyrs was likely deliberate. He eliminated the two women, for instance, and focused on the men he felt were important. Starting with Isaac the Cohen (kohen, or “priest”), he named the Chatelain family males; Solomon, the community treasurer; Baruch; Samson, the scribe and cantor (probably the Simon of the other poems); and another Samson, noted for his bravery under torture. Solomon also refers to Dominican and Franciscan friars, whose presence is confirmed by the French lament. In contrast, the fifth Troyes poem, also by Solomon Simhah, ខ is indeed baroque. An alphabetic acrostic, it is built of couplets of six words per verse. Each verse is constituted of two hemistichs (half verses) of three words apiece. Every word in the first three hemistichs begins with the same letter, as do the first two words of the last hemistich; the last word begins with the following letter in the alphabet and is repeated as the first word of the next couplet.30 The constraints imposed by the form blur the historical references in the poem. The Troyes laments show a distinct preference for portraiture, four out of five depicting individual martyrs in miniature tableaux. Jacob bar Judah’s laments list the thirteen martyrs by name, devoting a quatrain to each (except for the Chatelain brothers, who are burned together in a single stanza). Meir, in contrast, also lists the martyrs but spends six

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stanzas describing the death of Isaac Chatelain and his family, and one quatrain apiece for five others plus a quatrain describing two martyrs. Although much earlier poems had named individual martyrs (chiefly men), the use of such vignettes seems to be a thirteenth-century development. Martyrological commemorations of the First and Second Crusade period tended to generic descriptions of the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children. Indeed, the First Crusade laments emphasized demographic diversity; the poems (like the prose chronicles) illustrated the exemplary valor of entire communities—young men and old, young girls and mothers, infants and elderly—committed to qiddush haShem, sanctification of God’s Name. In chapter 2, we saw that the Blois laments (1171) marked an important change in this regard, focusing on the ideal of the scholar-rabbi. As an idealized martyr type, the scholar-rabbi spoke to his real-life analogues, the audience capable of deciphering the complex poetry in which he played a starring role. At the same time, the description of his heroic martyrdom was designed to reinforce the faith of simpler listeners, who mourned the loss of sons and daughters, siblings, spouses, parents and friends unnamed by the poems. If, as we have seen, the idealized scholar-rabbi mirrored the values of the Tosafist academies, it was no wonder: The authors of the martyrological poems had studied in those academies themselves. By the mid–thirteenth century, however, the Tosafist hold on northern French and Ashkenazic Jewish life had weakened; not only was the infrastructure of Tosafist authority debilitated, but the Tosafists themselves reveal some of the mystical and pietist attitudes of their rivals, the Ashkenaz Pietists.31 These changes perhaps account for the later poetry’s wider range of martyr types. The Troyes poems also strive for realistic depictions of the victims’ final moments, a stylistic trend echoed in contemporary Christian hagiography.32 The inclusion of a vernacular poem among this set of laments is, as mentioned, unique. Only four other examples of Old French Jewish poetry have survived, three of them liturgical and one a bawdy wedding song. The liturgical poems are free “translations” of traditional liturgical poems.33 With other fragmentary evidence, they attest that the use of the vernacular, even in the synagogue, was not as rare as once believed. According to his student, Solomon of Dreux recited portions of the Passover seder liturgy in French.34 Similarly, M. Banitt has shown that the Old French glosses in manuscript copies of biblical commentaries were students’ crib notes, scribbled in the course of lectures in the vernacular.35 Stray anecdotes such as the minatory tale found in the Sefer Hasidim, which describes a zealous rabbi burning a book of “romance” only to discover that the cover of a romance book had been used to rebind a sacred one, also suggest vernacular literacy.36

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Significantly, the use of the vernacular makes the text accessible to women as well as to men. By this I do not mean that Jacob bar Judah or the anonymous authors of the other examples of Old French liturgical verse composed their vernacular lyrics exclusively for a female audience. I mean only that, unlike Hebrew, the vernacular was a language to which women listeners had equal access with men. An introductory note in the manuscript indicates that the Hebrew laments were to be recited among the penitential verses sung for the fast of Gedaliah.37 We can imagine the solemn communal setting in which the texts were performed in Hebrew and Old French.38 In content, too, the vernacular lament reflects its wider audience potential. Mingling courtly and religious motifs with deft poetic skill, Jacob’s poem provides a valuable glimpse of the role of the heroic martyrs in the imaginative world of men and women beyond the small circle of scholars and students. Here it is no surprise that the martyr hero is noble, a man of valor, good looks, and wealth as well as learning, or that the martyr heroine is beautiful and defiant, while expressing devotion to her beloved spouse. After all, these are the attributes of the heroes of courtly romance, and hence of the culture in which Jews lived. Beginning with this unusual pair of poems, then, let us look at the Troyes laments for signs of literary and historical change. Jacob bar Judah’s laments are essentially translations of each other. Each poem contains seventeen monorhymed quatrains. The meter of the Hebrew poem is unstable, but based on a trochaic pattern; Darmesteter guessed that the French meter was originally alexandrine but corrupted by a later copyist.39 A few Hebrew words are strewn throughout (Torah, qedushah, hខ atan, kohen, sofer). The language is courtly, and reveals a keen eye for detail.40 The Hebrew text, constructed of biblical verses cobbled together, compels association with biblical situations and their exegetical traditions. When the martyr Samson cries, “Let me die!” using the words of the biblical Samson (tamut nafshi!), the listeners would complete the biblical verse with its explicit call for vengeance: “And Samson said, let me die with the Philistines. Then he bowed with all his might and the house fell upon the lords and all the people that were in it” (Judg. 16:30). The French text prefers to depict Samson’s robust defiance by having the dying man encourage his companions (“tot li atres a ehardit” 9. 3). Samson is led hastily to the fire like a bridegroom “de fere sa bele qedushah” (9. 1–2). This hybrid ideal, which pays homage to the importance of beauty as a romance ideal while honoring the Hebrew notion of sanctified martyrdom, offers eloquent testimony to the compound identity of medieval French Jews. The French and Hebrew poems encode much of the same information, each in distinctive ways.41 The Hebrew poem’s reliance on biblical allu-

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sion and typology elevates its concern with questions of theodicy. In contrast, the French text embraces the language and conventions of thirteenthcentury hagiographical romance. Its courtly phrases, dialogue, and detail provide a sense of contemporaneity and immediacy suppressed in the Hebrew poem.42 In both poems, for instance, the fifth stanza describes the death of Isaac Chatelain’s wife. Isaac was comfortably well-off and in his prime; his prominence in four of five laments suggests real stature in the community.43 As the French poem tells us, Isaac Chatelain was trained in the Tosafist school and a transmitter of tosafot (the hallmark “additions” to rabbinic learning that gave the Tosafist school its name) and peshat (the exegetical method that emphasized the “plain” or “literal” meaning of the biblical text). Isaac was the first to be burned, followed by his wife. According to the French lament: La prude fanme dant ele vit ardir son mari Mon li fit ma la departie; de ce jeta mot grant cri Ele dit: je va morir de tee mort com mon ami mori! D’efant etet grosse; por ce grant poine sofri. (5) [When the brave woman saw her husband burnt the separation grieved her greatly. She cried out loudly and said, I wish to die the same death as my beloved friend! She was big with child, and this made her suffer greatly.] In the Hebrew: ;ruy shc vzujt v,skuhk vrc ;rug v,bp tk vpurmv u,n, ;r, kt lsh -vc ehzjvk vrnt zt ;ra,u vuthmuv [Darling of her mother, she is held tightly by the captor. His purely devout one did not turn away her head. She said to hold her tightly: “Don’t loosen your grasp.” (They said) “Take her out and let her be burned.’ ”] At first sight, the Hebrew seems relatively poor in detail. In reality, it elides nothing found in the French. The verse “take her out and let her be burned” is from Gen. 38:24, where Judah has unjustly accused his widowed daughter-in-law Tamar of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The point of the association is the pregnancy, perhaps also the unjust accusation. Moreover, the opening line of the stanza draws on Song of Sol. 6.9, “My dove, my perfect one, is only one, the darling of her mother” (RSV); Rashi, the medieval Jewish commentator, emphasized the dove’s loyalty to its spouse. Thus the two critical details supplied in the French vignette are not stated in the Hebrew but resonate through a weave of

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primary and secondary associations. For a literate male audience, this kind of decoding and associative linkage formed part of the intrinsic activity of “reading” sacred texts (including liturgical verse). Moreover, the allusions in this case are not particularly abstruse. They require only a basic familiarity with the biblical text and Rashi’s commentary, the curriculum of schoolboys from early childhood.44 For a half century, in fact, the northern French rabbis had emphasized the primacy of Rashi’s interpretations by extending their ban on philosophical literature to include all exegetical works but Rashi’s.45 By 1288, the Tosafist academies were in decline. Nonetheless, their graduates still commanded authority and reverence. Jacob bar Judah respects Isaac Chatelain’s dual credentials of learning and wealth. In his French lament, moreover, he mourns Isaac and his companions as “proz cors sage e gent” (1. 3—brave hearts, wise and noble), while retaining the double tribute to Isaac as a man graced with “rentes e mesos” (property and houses) who was also a “bon reportor” (a good transmitter) of “Tosefot et de plain” (Tosafot and “plain” exegesis—the former referring to the dialectical methods of the Tosafists and the latter to the methods of literal exegesis applied to biblical text) (4. 2–4). The description of, Simon the cantor (“ki si bien savet oret”—who knew how to chant so well), also enlists a courtly tone: S’et por ma menie ke me vees ci desepeerer Se n’et pas por mo cors. (12. 2–3) [It is for my family you see me despair and not for myself/body.] In Hebrew, the stanza devoted to Simon concludes with the verse “God took him and Simon was no more” (12. 4), from Gen. 42:36. The verse alludes to the biblical Jacob, lamenting the destruction of his family—precisely what we have learned from the French tableau. The description of the death of the two Chatelain brothers is also worth comparing. The elder boy was a young husband whose wife’s death follows in stanza 7; the younger brother must have been a child. In the French, the frightened boy is comforted by his brother from the flames: Dos freres i furet ars, un petit e un grant. Lo petit fut ebahi de foe ki si s’eprent E dit: haro! j’ar tos! E li grant li aprent E li dit: a paradis seras tot, je to acrant. [Two brothers were burned, big and small. The younger one was frightened by the fire blazing about him

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and said, “Help! I am all afire!” The elder one instructed him, saying to him: “You will soon be in Paradise, I promise you.”] The Hebrew version reads: ohjupy hkkug ohguaga hcur ohjujv at ihc utc ohhba ohjt ,ca cuy rnth uvgrk aht ohjcz ujczhu ,ukug ukghu [Darling boys, nurtured infants, Two came into the fire of thorns. Each said to the other: “It is good for brothers to dwell (together).” And they made their offerings and sacrifices.] The French text accentuates the age difference between the two youths, the elder boy instructing and consoling the younger. On the surface, the Hebrew does not mark this difference, referring to “brothers” in the language of Ps. 133:1. Yet the stanza concludes with a phrase from Exod. 24:5, which describes the young men of Israel sent out to offer sacrifices to God. Rashi read the expression ne’urei-yisrael to mean only the eldest sons, an association that amends the lack of differentiation in the language of the psalm. So, too, they are “darling boys” and “nurtured infants,” echoing expressions from Jer. 31:19 (20) and Lam. 2:20. These biblical verses constituted a trope developed over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to describe Jewish mothers who sacrificed their children rather than yield them to the Christian foe for baptism.46 The allusion may imply that the younger boy might have been saved, ostensibly by converting, and I would hazard that the Chatelain mother (whose own death was described in the previous stanza), was offered a chance to save the younger boy and refused.47 Both the Hebrew and French descriptions of the last martyr, Hayyim of Chaource, indicate he was treated differently from his fellows: Ecores it ot un kadosch ki fu amene avant An li fit un petit fo, I l’alet an grivant. I huchet Ge de bon cor menu e sovant Docement cofri poine por servir le Ge Vivant. [Another holy martyr was brought forward. They made him a little fire, and placed him on it while torturing him. He called loudly to God, courageously, over and over again. Gently he suffered pain to serve the Living God.] (16) Again, the Hebrew seems less specific:

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ovub rhpff rutnk ,h,f lz ovc hhgr og huud rehh otb ovh,ucurtk vbhpug, ohbuhf ovhtmunk ov ohhj hf [Like pure oil for the lamp, like a raging lion cub, He spoke: “Let my body be as precious as those of my companions.” They shall fly to their roosts like doves For they (offer) Life [⳱ Hayyim] to those who find them.] (16) As before, the Hebrew “hides” details in its biblical allusions. The phrase zakh katit lama’or (pure oil for the lamp) is used in Exod. 23:20 and Lev. 24:2, where both the Bible and the later medieval commentators emphasize: (a) it is an offering brought by the people after the oil offering of the priests; (b) it is oil designated for the nerot, or candelabra; and (c) it is to burn continuously.48 In other words, it is an offering that follows the others; it is for a “little fire” and one that lasts a long time—all characteristics reflected in the brutal torture described in the French. What did Hayyim do to deserve this special fate? In this case, neither the Hebrew nor the French wanted to say. Fortunately, the fiscal accounts of Champagne for the second half of 1288 were not so squeamish. Along with assessments of the impounded wealth of the martyrs, we find a list of outstanding expenditures connected with the case. The latter include a disbursement of seven pounds “pour garder les biens Hagin de Chaoursse, li mener a Troies e pour le loier de l’ostel ou il demourit.”49 As Darmesteter hypothesizes, Hayyim (Hagin) must have fled home to Chaource early in the proceedings, and was returned to Troyes by the authorities to stand trial. The Hebrew poem—not the French—may allude to this with the image of doves returning to their roosts (Isa. 61:8). Both poems blur Hayyim’s flight to stress his redemptive martyrdom. In the French, his agonizing tortures further serve to elevate him; in Hebrew, it is the plea to die “like his companions.”50 There are of course significant differences as well as similarities between the Hebrew and Old French texts. Consistently, the Hebrew depicts the enemy in generic terms, while the French mixes generic formulae with specific mention of local officials (for instance, the bailli ) and friars.51 In stanza 7, for instance, the Chatelain son’s bride is promised a rich squire for a new husband if she will convert: la brus ki tant etet bele, an la vint por prechier Un ekier riche te donro[n]s ke tenret mot chier [They came to preach to the beautiful daughter-in-law: “We will give you a rich squire who will hold you dear.”]

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And in stanza 14, “prechors vinret R. Ichak Cohen rekerir,” urging him, too, to convert. The young wife spits on her accusers, while Isaac declares that as a priest he prefers to sacrifice his body to God. In the following stanza, Hayyim of Brinon, the surgeon and scholar, is asked by the bailli to convert (15. 2).52 He answers that he will not abandon the living God “por lor chien,” perhaps a reference to the Dominicans, often referred to as “barking” or “dogs” in Hebrew polemical texts.53 There are other differences, too. If the Hebrew draws on a familiar cast of biblical characters and martyrological poses, then the French turns to a courtly repertoire with its own associations. Jacob uses “bele” to refer to three martyrs or their sufferings [7. 1, 9. 2, 11. 4]. Equally courtly touches are the use of “proz cors sage e gent” [1. 3], “home de valor” [3. 4], or “la prude fanme” [5. 1], “ami” [5. 3], and “prodome” [12. 1]. While Hayyim of Chaource, the last martyr, “doucement cofri poine por servir le Ge Vivant” [16. 4], he cries out to God courageously “menu e sovant,” an expression taken straight from the death of the hero of La Chanson de Roland.54 The expression may, of course, have been idiomatic by Jacob’s time, in which case its appearance remains an illustration of Jewish immersion in vernacular idiom. It is tempting, however, to believe that Jacob knew its origin, for the description of Roland “cleimet sa culpe e menu e suvent” describes the hero’s dying act of confession. Even more, Roland’s death results directly from his stubborn refusal to flee—an association that in Hayyim of Chaource’s case becomes a kind of martyrological rehabilitation. There is dialogue in both the French and Hebrew poems, but the percentage of each lament given to direct speech is much greater in the Old French text—nearly double the number of lines and triple the number of words. In general, the martyrs are livelier in the vernacular. Many of the Hebrew quatrains devote at least one line to a description of the martyr’s death or to the purifying flames. Attentive to different conventions and to the affective style of the vernacular, the French emphasizes the martyrs’ suffering, and not the transcendence of their deaths. The courtly features of the vernacular, the greater focus on pathos, pain, and love, represent a marked sensitivity to literary fashions of the times as well as to a mixed audience. Some of these characteristics, such as a penchant for pathos and detail, recur in the other Troyes laments as well. Yet Jacob’s laments remain unique illustrations of a single author adapting his subject matter to two distinct sets of literary conventions. The Hebrew version conveys an elegiac tribute to the martyrs in language assuming a basic but not extraordinary literacy, memorializing the holy saints for their loyalty to their families, their piety and learning, and their steadfast willingness to die for

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their faith. The French adapts these same essential values to vernacular language and conventions, creating vignettes of devotion and pathos that remind us that the writers, victims, and audience had much in common with their foes. In distinct ways, the remaining poems confirm that picture. Meir ben Eliav’s lament, “Ez’aq hខ amas” (I Cry Out over the Violence), is composed of quatrains that embed a dual acrostic: The first letter of the first word of each quatrain spells out the Hebrew alphabet, while the first letters of each third verse spell the poet’s name. The verses are loosely cobbled citations or paraphrases of biblical verses, and the meter hovers at approximately ten syllables per line. This is Meir’s only known poetic composition, and Darmesteter thought it of little value.55 Its chief importance to him lay in the historical details it preserved and that were not found in other texts. Compared to Jacob bar Judah’s two poems, Meir’s lament is awkwardly phrased and constructed; the poet labors to describe the martyrs in biblical phrases whose associative connections do not obviously illuminate his meaning. Nonetheless, the poem is interesting in ways Darmesteter chose to ignore. Like Jacob, Meir attempted to describe individual martyrs in a series of vignettes that would capture some essential characteristic of that martyr’s resistance and end. The result is an uneven string of portraits, which nonetheless commences clearly: This lament commemorates “the saints of the city of Troyes, [God’s] chosen portion” (2. 2), who were accosted in their homes on the seventh day of Passover (3. 3). The Christians who mourned their Lord (4. 2 and 5. 2) were filled with envy for the favor God had shown the Jews (!) and entered Isaac Chatelain’s house in an armed group, where “they spoke peaceably but in their heart planned an ambush” (5. 4). Stanzas 7–10 are devoted to the martyrdom of Isaac Chatelain and his family; the poet continues with descriptions of Solomon (11), Isaac haCohen (12), Simon the scribe (13), Samson (14–15), Solomon and Hayyim (16), Jonah (17), and Hayyim the surgeon (18). Comparing the list of names with Jacob’s and with the roster preserved in the Mainz memorbuch, we can see one “Solomon” should actually be a “Simon.” Baruch (Bendit d’Avirey) is missing, and the two women are mentioned only in passing. Completing the alphabetic acrostic, four concluding stanzas praise God and the martyrs and ask God to hear His people’s prayer and forgive them their sins. The lament is penitential. Stanzas 2 and 19–22 refer to declaring God’s might “before the multitude” (2. 1) and call on the congregation to sing and pray to God “that He might pass over our sins as before” (20. 3).56 The final verses are drawn from Ps. 31:23 (⳱ RSV 31:22) and, more significantly, 1 Kings 8:52, where they refer to Solomon’s public prayer at the dedication of the Temple (22. 2–4). Repeatedly, Meir refers

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to the community as singled out by God (2, 3, 7, 8). This is traditional Jewish theology, perhaps amplified by the heightened sense of election reflected also in the self-image of French Christianity. Isaac Chatelain becomes the central figure of the poem: In groups they [the Christians] went, each man with his sword, For the sake of the crucified one . . . he invented [?] They came to Isaac’s house. He was a man in his prime. They spoke peaceably to him but in their hearts [or, in their midst] planned an ambush [Jer. 9:7]. Isaac feared greatly when he heard the noise of the crowd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mirth and joy fled, and dance turned to mourning. The sun and moon stood in place [Hab. 3:1]. He prepared a sacrifice and fulfilled his vows. He took his two boys with him. His wife and daughter-in-law went after him. Therefore the Lord will rejoice over His young men [Isa. 9:16]. He remembered God’s graciousness and went in His ways, He took great pains to occupy himself with God’s commandments and teachings. For us, his merit will ascend and his light will shine: The rod of the man whom He chooses will blossom [Num. 17:20]. He who was pure of hands endeavors to endure the fire. The nations said to him: You will surely perish! [But] He will give his fruit in its season and his leaves will not wither, The adversary’s mouth will be closed and he will no longer cause harm [Ps. 63:12 ⳱ RSV 63:11]. Isaac, his only son, was bound like a lamb. He was learned and tested in Torah and Mishnah. An intolerable people plundered his tent. May his merit stand for us and all his skill in deeds [Eccles. 4:4].57 We learn from this mini-narrative about the unannounced visit of the Christians to Isaac’s home on Friday night and their plot to denounce Isaac. The Christians are armed, and Isaac is afraid of them, as he fears violence from a gathering mob. William Jordan is, I think, incorrect to claim Isaac was not charged with ritual murder.58 Meir is clear about the fact that the Christians seek to avenge their murdered God, and the coincidence of Passover and Good Friday in 1288 supplies a familiar setting

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for a blood libel accusation. What else (from the Christians’ view) would the Jews be doing with a Christian corpse on their Passover festival? Like Abraham taking his servants (and son) to Moriah, Isaac takes his two boys with him to the stake, and the two women with them. At this point, Meir suspends his narrative to tell us something of Isaac’s character. He is a religiously observant man and a scholar whose righteousness in life empowers him to intercede on behalf of his fellow Jews after he has died. The verse that concludes the eighth stanza, from Num. 17:20, alludes to the confrontation between the biblical Korah and Moses, a story that will appear in Solomon Simhah’s ខ lament also. Here it suggests the polemical confrontation between Christianity and Judaism and their competing claims to divine attention. The ninth stanza follows logically, describing the Christians who taunt the dying man with assertions that he has forfeited eternal life. Despite its stylistic clumsiness, this is a detailed work of poetic narrative. The remaining descriptions focus on the executions of the remaining martyrs. For some of the martyrs, Meir ben Eliav falls back on a long familiar device in liturgical poetry, reiterating variations of an etymological root as a means of binding his verses together. Thus, the description of Isaac the priest (the kohen) in stanza 12 uses the root tខ-h-r (pure) six times in four verses; the following description of Simon the scribe (sofer) contains four variations on the root s-f-r [to tell or count]. The quatrain devoted to Samson (14) emphasizes the willingness of the victims to be martyred by doubling the use of n-d-v (volunteer, give generously), and Hayyim the surgeon’s righteousness is matched with God’s with a doubled use of the root y-sh-r (18). Meir’s inability to sustain this poetic device testifies to his uneven poetic skills. Yet, his attempt still demonstrates that he was blending old and new conventions, reinforcing a model of defiant piety for the living even as he composed a memorial to the dead. Meir is also less deft than Jacob bar Judah in conjuring biblical and exegetical associations to add dimension and backdrop to his descriptions. Again, this may reflect the deterioration of northern French rabbinic education by the late thirteenth century, (aggravated by the book shortage described in chapter 3). The basic intertextual principle of composition nonetheless remains the same. For instance, the martyr Samson says to his captors, “This time I am blameless” (niqeiti ha-pa’am), quoting the biblical Samson in search of his wife, whose father has given her away to a new husband (see Judg. 15 and especially Judg. 15:3). The full verse, as Meir’s audience knew, expressed Samson’s wrath over his lost wife and his announced plans for revenge: “This time I am blameless with regard to the Philistines when I do them mischief.” Jacob bar Judah had similarly described Samson as saying elliptically, “Let me die,” leaving his audience to add “with the Philistines” (see Judg. 16:30). The

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appearance of this revenge motif in both poems may indicate that Samson really called for vengeance while dying. However, where Jacob bar Judah was capable of evoking this kind of association consistently, Meir is not and instead relies on narrative to create portraits of depth. In fact, the narrative form of Meir’s lament calls to mind another martyrological verse narrative, Hillel of Bonn’s “Emunei-shelumei yisrael” for the Blois martyrs. Indeed, Meir may have had Hillel’s composition in mind. In a concluding verse, he prays for eternal rest for emunai sheleimai, “my faithful, peacable ones.”59 For the sake of an acrostic, Hillel had reversed this obscure biblical expression, taken from 2 Sam. 20:19 (shelumei emunei yisrael). Meir does not need the phrase inverted, except to echo the Blois lament. An interest in dramatic narrative also characterizes Solomon Simhah’s ខ poem “Shaខhar avi’ todah” (At Dawn I Shall Bring an Offering). Once again, Darmesteter thought this poem lacked literary merit. In contrast, Bernfeld, an editor not given to aesthetic effusions, commented that this lament was “splendid for its poetic beauty.”60 Goldschmidt and Fraenkel identified the author with the Solomon (bar Eleazer?) the Scribe whose poem “El erekh apayyim” (O Long-Suffering God) was also dedicated to the martyrs of Troyes. In their opinion, “Shaខhar avi’ todah” resembles other Spanish-style piyyutim by Solomon, which rely on a “clear” and “daring” use of biblical citations.61 Formally, the poems to which they refer have long stanzas with refrains, and verses that divide into two hemistichs of six syllables apiece. In “Shaខhar avi’ todah,” the martyrs portray themselves as burnt offerings. The athletic resilience that often characterizes the suffering of Christian martyrs in literature from this period finds an analogue here in the enthusiasm with which the Troyes victims offer themselves up, piece by piece, in a parody of biblical sacrificial rites. Thus the martyr Solomon says: Behold, I have made libation [to] my King, said Solomon to God. And in order to please him, I have arranged my affairs. I bow on my knee, to confess my transgressions, To illumine my darkness, I offer my head and my face, My hands and feet, too—for in him is my Source. I shall make libation with blood and tears. On the fiery altar, my heart is laid out, my soul [life] is my offering. My pain is nectar to my palate, and the fire of my foes has no power [over me]. May it be pleasing in God’s eyes, O Lord revered among the holy, For all the community are saints. [Refrain] (stanza 5)

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Other martyrs repeat this imagery. Samson says, Behold me here, God, to worship you—may my sacrifice be acceptable! Among these saints, who surpasses me? From my own blood pouring down I shall make a libation of wine, On the fiery altar wine and tears will go up. (stanza 7.3–7) The same motif governs the (textually corrupt) description of Samson in stanza 8: The Lord showed me his great fire in the camp. And Sir Samson forget his misery and answered: Behold me for the sake of his Holy Name burned, beaten, and tortured. I shall go to his sanctuary and respond in song . . . [his soul] . . . sacrifice the double-portion of bread His hands, his feet, his head—for behold it is the Sabbath day. (8.1–6) The martyr Baruch, too, proclaims that when he “ascends the cloud” in sacrifice, “my head will be revealed in the fire / and all my blood drained” (6.4–5). These graphic images are yet another sign that medieval European Jews shared the tastes of their Christian neighbors, whose martyrological traditions convey similar interests. As Caroline Bynum and others have shown, images of human fragmentation occur frequently in thirteenth-century art and literature, and relate to a variety of concerns, for instance those connected with the cult of relics.62 A late thirteenth-century text from the south of France even offers a secular analogue to Solomon’s lament. Isaac haGorni, a Hebrew troubadour whose extant poems describe his travels and travails through a series of Jewish communities in late thirteenth-century Provence, wrote a parodic “last will and testament” in which he bestowed various body parts upon former lovers and friends: And from afar they will bring the dust of my tomb to be peddled to beautiful girls as cosmetics, And the planks of my coffin shall go to barren women, to give birth to sons and daughters. They shall grind up my lice for stutterers and mutes, that they may speak in seventy tongues, And my hair shall turn into instruments’ strings, to please those who can’t play tunes.

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My sash shall become an adulterer’s girdle, that he may cease whoring and adultery, And all my instruments shall become sacred relics, and my robes guarded like treasure! Oh, who shall pulverize my bones before they make them into icons?63 Gorni was writing in about 1293, and in a southern environment that still owed much to Hebrew culture in Spain. Nonetheless, his “last will and testament” is equally indebted to a general cultural preoccupation with bodily fragmentation, also expressed in the prevalence of relic cults in northern and southern France. Unlike the representations in Christian literature, however, Hebrew images of bodily dismemberment are linked to descriptions of the biblical cult, a convention that emerged in descriptions of First Crusade violence. As Solomon’s listeners knew, sacrificial offerings come only from the best and unblemished among the flock. “How goodly are the tents of Troyes,” sings Solomon midway through his poem, “for no lack of piety is found among them, and no disgrace is seen” (6.1–2). Accordingly, the Troyes martyrs are consistently depicted as figures of great learning, wealth, and privilege, whose heroic attributes distinguish them from “ordinary” men and women. In “El erekh apayyim,” also, descriptions of oppression alternate with descriptions of the distinctive merits of the “chosen” martyrs. The foe seeks to make “me” (in the collective voice of the poet) worship his cross, and when “I refused, they beset me / to burn my elite” (1.30). Considered with the emphasis on volunteerism in Meir ben Eliav’s lament (14.1–3), it may be that the community leaders in Troyes died to spare the community. Solomon’s refrain line, taken from Num. 16:3: “For all the community are saints,” proclaims the sanctity of the entire community. (In the biblical context, the word qedoshim would mean that they are “holy” or set apart for God; in medieval northern Europe, the word also meant “martyrs” or “saints.”) Even though thirteen martyrs were chosen to give their lives for God, all of the Jewish men and women of Troyes are saints (who would have behaved as did the martyrs if they had to). Nonetheless, the biblical allusion to a crisis of leadership may hint at a state of less than total harmony between “all the community” and its chosen saints. Is this in fact a decorous allusion to the internal disarray among Jewish leaders and in their communities, noted in earlier chapters? Solomon’s interest in mystical (even magical) practices associated with the German Pietists is known.64 Unsurprisingly, he also describes the death of the martyrs in mystical language unlike any we have encoun-

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tered thus far. “Shaខhar avi’ todah” begins with a collective description of the martyrs, “the pride and splendor of the people” (1.5), who “together propounded a riddle / in order to seek God” (1.6). This strange image is echoed in “El erekh apayyim”: As they streamed forth, their faces were rosy.65 The infants saw and grew wise. They understood secrets [?], and even this. (vv. 11–12) This passage may allude to Mishnah Avot 6.1 (umegallin lo razei-Torah), which counts among the benefits of studying the Law the revelation of its secrets.66 The centrality of the divine light, emanating through the “window” of the sun, in Solomon’s cosmology, suggests also that the illuminated faces of the martyrs in the fire have become images of mystical transfiguration.67 The ending of the couplet (“and even this”) quotes from Lev. 26:44, God’s promise not to abandon Israel even in the midst of its enemies. Rashi’s interpretation is relevant: “Even if I do ‘this’ to them—meaning the persecutions I declared while they were in the land of their enemies.” Whatever Solomon means by these allusions, they are a far cry from the sorts of images that depicted the deaths of the Jewish victims of judicial violence in the previous century. In the typology of the Blois poems, the martyr’s death became theophany—a public revelation of God’s power and presence described so as to reverse the shattering vision of Jews at the stake.68 Over the course of the thirteenth century, these images of public revelation and renewal gave way to images of personal transcendence in death. The martyr him or herself might meet God in the flames of the pyre, but the poets retreat from the imagery of collective revelation. With such a small sample, any conclusions are tentative, but if the Troyes poems are any indication of martyrological conventions at the end of the thirteenth century, the death of the martyrs has become an intimate experience unimagined by the coevals of Rabbenu Tam. Indeed, in Solomon’s language, the death of the martyr is a moment of mystical knowledge vouchsafed to an elite.69 In keeping with this tone, the martyr Solomon, in “Shaខhar avi’ todah;” claims both immunity to fire and imperviousness to pain: “My pains are nectar to my palate / the fire of my tormentors has no power over me” (4.8). His assertion (lo sholeខt esh monai ) echoes Ephraim of Bonn’s account of the Blois martyrs who say: “Behold the fire has no power over us (hineh ha-esh ein sholeខtet banu)—why can’t we go free?”70 Again, for the Blois poets, this dramatic incident reaffirmed Sinai, the symbol of God’s covenant with Israel. In contrast, when the motif of fireproof martyrs resurfaces in Jewish martyrological texts and attitudes of the later

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thirteenth century, such as in Solomon’s poem, it is a personal (and analgesic) miracle. The oft-cited text of Meir of Rothenburg, Solomon’s teacher, similarly emphasizes the ability of individual martyrs to transcend torture and pain.71 Solomon’s poems contain another tantalizing detail. “Shaខhar avi’ todah” refers twice to the ashes of the victims, which are to be “raised up” in witness: Let him bring the ashes of his sacred offering / before the multitude and show zeal. (7.7) Raise up their ashes / and put [them] in your bosom For they are a pure offering, / and they were attacked and tormented for no reason. (9.6–7) On one level, Solomon alludes to biblical sacrificial rites. The expression harimu et dishnam refers to the daily sweeping away of the ashes performed by the biblical priests after the offerings had burned through the night (Lev. 6:3–4). We recall that Hillel of Verona, also writing in the late thirteenth century, emphasized the ashes of the burned books of Maimonides that remained heaped at the scene of their burning in Paris, later mingling (in his imagination) with the ashes of the burned Talmud.72 Scholars have commented on Hillel’s erroroneous assumption that the Talmud was burned a mere forty days after the Moreh and in the same place. As a motif, however, Hillel’s description shares with Solomon’s an interest in ashes as a material relic of the burned book or man. Moreover, the technical phrase heirim et dishnam describes an act of elevating ashes for display. Could the poet refer to a real gesture? Certainly, the remains of the victims themselves were not used in any liturgical context. Although medieval evidence is lacking, studies of early modern executions confirm that authorities were unlikely to permit the return of remains of someone burned for heresy to family or friends. Usually the victim’s ashes were buried or scattered in a nearby river.73 But the poems of Jacob bar Judah were composed for inclusion with other penitential hymns designated for use on the fast day of Gedaliah. According to rabbinic tradition, fast-day rites included wearing “sackcloth and ashes.” The early practice described in the Mishnah (completed by the early third century) called for the Ark containing the Torah to be removed from the synagogue and strewn with ashes, which also adorned the heads of the community leaders, then others.74 While this practice disappeared from most fast-day liturgies, it survived in fast-day rites designated for the aversion of calamities.75 In the aftermath of an auto da f´e,

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a cantor or preacher could have dramatically exploited this ancient symbol of mourning. As David Wachtel has shown, the fast-day liturgies described in late medieval books of customs from Ashkenaz were carefully choreographed. The liturgies that included martyrological observances called for dressing the Ark and Torah scrolls in black, and a procession to the cemetery, which was then circled before prayers were recited at the graves of the martyr “saints.”76 All of these visual, oral, and kinetic elements constituted a rich sensory and symbolic experience in which the laments as texts played an important but hardly exclusive role. By the end of the thirteenth century, then, our texts suggest that the commemoration of martyrdom was comprised of a range of literary and material practices. Moreover, the conventions that governed these practices drew from a variety of resources, some traditionally Jewish and some adapted consciously and unconsciously from contemporary Christian practice. At the same time, in matters of aesthetic taste, the rabbi-poets demonstrate the pervasiveness of contemporary cultural attitudes and trends. The affective and even mystical elements of the Troyes laments are but two examples that tell us that late thirteenth-century French Jews were still very much part of cultural developments around them. Meir bar Eliav’s claim that the Christians were envious of God’s favor to the Jews, even as a literary topos, has meaning only in a world where such a claim would be plausible in some form. Yet the heel of royal policies came down with crushing force on this particular community, and the distinctive laments for the victims illustrate the shock wrought by this sudden blow. Perhaps more than earlier texts, these laments also point beyond the elite world of texts and scholars into the space inhabited by those who read and heard them, perhaps imperfectly but with faith. Just two years after the Troyes incident, a Jew was burned in nearby Paris following the first recorded accusation of a host desecration. But the story of Jonathan enfolds another possible narrative as well, one the next chapter seeks to recover. How pervasive was the imagery and lore of Jewish martyrdom? What do we know about the forms of martyrocentric thinking and behavior among ordinary Jews? To the so-called popular use of these conventions we now turn.

Notes This chapter had its origins in an essay published as “The Troyes Laments: Jewish Martyrology in Hebrew and Old French,” which dealt with the pair of laments for the Troyes martyrs written by Jacob b. Judah. The core of that essay, adapted and abridged, has been incorporated into the discussion of Jacob’s poems in this

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chapter. I am grateful to the editors at Viator for their permission to reproduce a section of the original essay here. 1. A. Darmesteter published the texts of four of the laments in “L’Auto da f´e de Troyes”; this publication followed the first appearance of Jacob bar Judah’s ´ egies du Vatican.” The Hebrew and French laments in Darmesteter’s “Deux El´ later piece, including the texts of Meir ben Eliav’s lament and Solomon bar Simhah’s ខ “Shahar ខ avi’ todah,” but not Jacob bar Judah’s poems, was summarized in a Hebrew review in He-Asif 4 (1888), 113–19. The fifth lament, “El erekh apayyim,” by (Solomon) Simhah ខ the Scribe, was published by Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 2:632–36 (poem no. 287). 2. See Jordan, 1989; Chazan, 1973a. 3. Proceedings, in Jordan’s words (1989, p. 191), characterized by “loose judicial constraints.” 4. Darmesteter 1881, pp. 245–46; Jordan, 1989, p. 187; Chazan, 1973a, p. 181. 5. Jordan, 1989, p. 187; Strayer, 1980, pp. 237–300. 6. Darmesteter, 1881, pp. 236, 246–47. See also Strayer, 1980. For more on Renier de la Belle, see below. 7. P. Pi´etresson de Saint-Aubin, p. 85. The number of houses is five, not two as indicated in my article, “The Troyes Laments,” 207. Five houses could easily account for all if not most of the martyrs. The Chatelain household, which included five of the martyrs, was destroyed. See the transcription of the Champagne accounts for the second half of 1288 in Darmesteter, 1881, p. 236, which record a payment to Robert Chenonele and Baudoin de Sanliz “pour garder et exploiter les biens des Juis joutisi´es c.s.; e pour abattre la meison Haquin Chastelein iiii lb.” (f.398 col.2 of the Compotus terre camp . . . Bibl. Nat. Clairambault 487). The Hebrew lament of Meir ben Eliav also refers to the pillaging of the Chatelain home (v. 39). 8. Jordan, 1989, p. 190; Pi´etresson, p. 86, n. 2. 9. Jordan, 1989, p. 187. 10. Ibid., p. 190. 11. Strayer, 1971a, pp. 300–315. This attitude met its counterpart in the stubborn convicton of the Jews that their piety singled them out as uniquely worthy of supreme sacrifice. See further on. 12. Darmesteter, 1881, p. 247. 13. Lazard, p. 237; the order was dated March 18, 1288. See also Jordan, 1989, p. 187. 14. Jean l’Ane was the king’s clerk, and Geoffrey a bourgeois. See Lazard, p. 238. 15. Benton, p. 287. 16. The accounts for the second half of both 1287 and 1288 are cosigned by Renier Acorre [sic] and Gentien. Two receivers were also in office for the years 1291–97, 1306–1307 and 1319–20; see Ozanam, pp. 337 and 343. Regarding Biche and Mouche, see the following note. 17. Strayer, 1980, pp. 113, 116; and 1971b, p. 239. 18. Ibid., p. 116; 1971b, pp. 242–43; Ozanam, p. 343. 19. The ordinance includes what Darmesteter reads as a specific rebuke to

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Renier de la Belle, “pour s’ˆetre faire le serviteur des Inquisiteurs,” 1881, p. 246. Copies of the order were sent to all the royal seneschals, baillis, and officials: “Senescallos et Baillivos et alios officiales nostros, ne possint per ignorantiam excusari nostri officiales predicti, in dictum mandatum apostolicum exequndum.” Darmesteter, 1881, p. 246, n.1. 20. Viard, 1940, p. 151, no. 949, notes 1 and 3; and Strayer, 1971c, pp. 233– 34. 21. See chapter 1 for the details and available data. Shatzmiller has estimated that at its peak, “voluntary” conversion accounted for a 5 to 10 percent attrition rate from the Jewish community. See Shatzmiller, 1995, p. 318. 22. Vat. Heb. 322, ff.188b–189b. Bartolocci’s 1693 catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts included a reference to these laments without identifying their author, and a series of subsequent references compounded inaccuracies in earlier notices; Giulio Bartolocci, 4:322 (no. 1579). See also Stephanus and Josephus Assemani, 1:307 no. cccxxii. Darmesteter’s citation of Johann Christoph Wolf, Bibliotheca hebraea 1 (1715): 1415 is in error; the correct reference is to vol. 2 (1721): 1419. See also Renan, pp. 477–82; Steinschneider and Berliner, pp. 3–5; Zunz, 1865a, p. 367. 23. Renan, 479. 24. Darmesteter, 1881, p. 220. 25. Ibid., p. 221. 26. See Ta-Shma, 1982–83, pp. 416–38; Freudenthal, pp. 187–234; and the treatment of Solomon’s theosophical doctrine in Kanarfogel, 2000, pp. 239–43. 27. Solomon refers to himself as “the persecuted”; Ta-Shma, p. 426. In one excerpt from the Sefer haMaskil, Solomon distinguishes between the biblical cult (which called for sacrificial offerings to face east, toward the sun, because the divine ether pierced the heavenly curtain through the “window” we call the sun) and idolatrous worship of the sun (which directs devotion to the sun itself as a material object). Ta-Shma, p. 431, comments wrily: “It is unnecessary to exert one’s imagination greatly to gage the reaction to such idiosyncratic ideas among the Jews of Ashkenaz and France” (translation mine). See also Freudenthal, p. 197. 28. Kanarfogel, 2000, p. 239; Ta-Shma, pp. 435–36. 29. The text is deficient; in addition to lacunae, the stanzas are in fact not all of equal length. The first stanza has eight lines (plus refrain), stanzas 2–7 have nine, 8 has eleven and 9 has thirteen lines (all plus refrain). The resemblance to the French ballad form is striking, although there are also Sephardic genres, such as the zajal, which develop longer stanzas with refrains. 30. Something like: Afterward, Alice ate / apples and artichokes Asking amicably about / an abundant buffet. Buffet breakfasts buying / bountiful buttery bread Better baked biscuits, / boasting bite-sized crumbs. 31. Kanarfogel, 1993; 2000. 32. Vauchez, 1991, pp. 21–33. 33. The texts were published by Blondheim, 1926 and 1927.

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34. Solomon of Dreux, sometimes known as “the saint [qadosh] of Dreux,” was a student of the R”i (R. Isaac of Dampi`ere). Samuel of Falaise reported that Solomon recited the liturgy for the Passover seder in the vernacular through the end of the “four questions,” so that “the women would understand.” Urbach, 1955, p. 279. 35. Banitt, 1966. A 36. Sefer Hasidim, ed. Reuven Margoliouth, par. 141 (⳱ Bologna edition, par. 142). 37. Cf. Blondheim, 1926, pp. 83, 159; and see n. 28 above. 38. The liturgical use of the vernacular is itself exciting. Blondheim had hypothesized of the few other liturgical poems in Old French that the Hebrew and French were sung antiphonally, stanza by stanza. This poem lacks the written cues on which he based this claim, but it is not impossible that this was the mode of performance. See Blondheim, 1926, pp. 34–35, 83. 39. Darmesteter identified the dialect of the poet as Champenois. See the detailed discussion at the end of Darmesteter, 1874, pp. 31–37 and especially p. 36. 40. Darmesteter assumed that the “realistic” touches to the description implied that Jacob bar Judah had been an eyewitness to the burning. I am dubious, although it is of course not impossible; “realism,” too, is a style, and one favored by twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular writers. 41. The examples that follow are taken from my article in Viator, “The Troyes Elegies.” 42. See Dembowski; Childress; Hurley; and Hume. 43. His importance was recognized by the Christians as well, who orchestrate their ritual murder charges around a corpse deposited in his house. Darmesteter (1881) supplies the Champagne fiscal accounts for the second half of 1288, which record Chatelain’s property and assets—several houses in the juiverie and one in Moulins Omont, a quarter of a vineyard plot in Preiere, a cow and ox and other furnishings, see p. 235. His discussion of their meaning in terms of relative wealth (pp. 237–38) should be taken skeptically; by 1288, Jews in northern France did not possess fabulous wealth. 44. See Kanarfogel, 1993. 45. See the discussion of the French rabbis and the Maimunist controversy in chapter 3. 46. See my discussion in 2000a. The Lamentations text describes the cannibalism of Jewish mothers during the seige of Jerusalem: “Should women eat their offspring, the children of their nurturing?” and the context of the Jeremiah text includes the image of mother Rachel “weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are gone” (Jer. 31:14). 47. Jordan (1989, p. 191) has expressed his doubt over precisely this point: “I am particularly dubious of the alleged judicial execution of the children of the accused even with the loose judicial constraints that seem to have characterized all the proceedings.” However, the elder child was already a husband, and legally an adult. If the younger child was offered and refused an offer of conversion (an option also rejected by his mother), he could also have been sent to the flames. Obviously, there is no way to know what really happened, but the subtext of the Hebrew is suggestive.

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48. See the biblical text and the commentaries of Rashi, the Rashbam (R. Samuel b. Meir); and Ramban (Nahmanides). ខ 49. Darmesteter, 1881, p. 244. 50. The insistence that all martyrs are equal in death is of obvious importance, and when conflict between reality and ideal surfaces is found in a lament, it is significant. See the examples offered in the beginning of chapter 1. Another thirteenth-century illustration is a lament published by Salfeld, who believed it described an incident in Anjou, either in 1236 or 1251. One of the martyrs, according to the poem, is boiled, while the others are all burned. Although nothing in the poem explains why this martyr died differently from his fellows, we do know that boiling was the standard punishment for counterfeiting or coinage offenses, perhaps indicating what precipitated this particular tragedy. The poem, “Abi’ah miqreh,” by Solomon b. Joseph, is found in Salfeld, pp. 352–58; for execution by boiling, see Cuttler, p. 118. 51. In general, Hebrew references to the preaching orders are nearly impossible to find in martyrological poetry. The Hebrew poems of Solomon Simhah ខ also refer to the Dominicans and Franciscans, but Solomon was an unusual poet in many ways, as we shall see. The only other poetic references I have found are in the lament “Ahbirah ខ milin,” attributed to Meir of Rothenburg, which contains an obscure reference to what may be friars in tattered clothing (the poem appears in Schirmann, 1939, pp. 25–27. A lament for ninety Jews killed at Munich in ខ 1285, by Hayyim ben Makir, mentions “priests” (see “ ‘Ir hakemarim,” no. 11 in the same volume); Baruch of Magenza (Mainz) in his poem for the Blois martyrs (1171) mentions priests as well (Baruch of Magenza, p. 50). The Blois reference is to an Augustinian canon. 52. For the identification of the bailli of Troyes in 1288, Renier de la Belle, see Darmesteter, 1881, p. 244, nn. 2 and 3; and the lists assembled by Delisle, 1904, p. *167. My thanks to William Jordan for his help with this identification. See also the discussion earlier in this chapter. 53. The derogatory use actually predates the emergence of the mendicant orders. Ephraim of Bonn refers to either monks or priests as “barking,” a derisive pun on Isa. 56:10; see Ephraim’s Sefer Zekhirah, p. 17. Medieval polemical literature, such as the Sefer Yosef haMeqanne, also uses this expression. In Hebrew, the term was eventually restricted to the Dominicans. Indeed, the Jews may have known of the popular Latin etymology (sometimes positive, sometimes not) deriving “Dominican” from “Domini canes,” “hounds of the Lord.” Our poetic references are unusual. The lament of Solomon Simhah ខ describes Dominicans and Franciscans; see the discussion below. 54. “Le gentilz quens, qu’il fut mort cunquerant, Cleimet sa culpe e menu e suvent / Pur ses pecchez Deu en purffrid li guart”; laisse 174, La Chanson de Roland, p. 198. I am grateful to Heather Arden of the University of Cincinnati for her help in identifying the expression. 55. Darmesteter, 1881, p. 221. The poem also appears in Bernfeld, 1:335–39. 56. And compare similar allusions in 8.2 (stanza 8, second versicle) and 10.4. 57. Stanzas 5–10. 58. Jordan, 1989, p. 191. 59. Darmesteter translates “mes amis fid`eles.”

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60. Bernfeld, 1:339, n. 5; the text of the poem runs from pp. 339–43. 61. Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, 2:825–26. 62. Bynum, 1991. See especially the last essay in this collection, titled “Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” pp. 239–99. On p. 266, Bynum comments that the interest was not merely among intellectuals: “[w]hen we look at the way in which ordinary thirteenth-century people behaved, we find there, too, a concern with material continuity and thus with corruption, partition and reintegration of bodies.” See also, Head, 1998; Geary, 1994b; and the examples amassed by Camporesi. 63. Isaac haGorni, “Le hishqi ខ hineni holekh letannot,” in Schirmann, 1960, part 2, no. 409, pp. 483–84, vv. 11–17. My translation. 64. Solomon’s theosophical writing also refers to mystical liturgical practices and the use of the Divine Name in the conjuration of angelic and demonic forces. See Kanarfogel, 2000, pp. 239–45; and Freudenthal. 65. Compare the line in “Shahar ខ avi’ todah,” in which Jonah’s “face grew red in the Law of Fire” (5.5). 66. Technically the passage is a baraita, a teaching added to the Mishnah but not strictly part of it. The entire section, known as the Baraita de-Rabbi Meir, is part of the traditional daily liturgy. See Birnbaum, pp. 523–24. 67. See Freudenthal. 68. See the discussion in chapter 2. 69. Significantly, Solomon uses the same evocative language to describe the state of mystical awareness achieved by the esoteric seeker. Freudenthal notes that Solomon, in describing his own quest for enlightenment, frames his “turning to God . . . in the language of Moses; God’s response . . . is transmitted in . . . phrases describing divine revelation.” Noting that Solomon has God address his literary persona as “Son of Man,” an expression associated with the book of Ezekiel, Freudenthal concludes that “it is possible to say that R. Solomon. . . . saw himself as someone who spoke with prophetic inspiration.” Freudenthal, p. 197. 70. Ephraim of Bonn, p. 32. 71. “Meir of Rothenburg used to say that when a man decided to give his life in Sanctification of the Name, no matter what they do to him—whether it is stoning or burning or being buried alive or hanged—it does not hurt him at all . . . and you should know that if a man sticks his finger in a flame he will scream, even if he tries not to he will not be able to restrain himself. Yet many give themselves to burning and slaughter in Sanctification of God’s Name, may He be blessed, and they do not cry out, neither alack nor alas. Furthermore, people say that if he should mention the Unique Name beforehand, he is guaranteed to A adoq, par. 415, p. 72. I return withstand the trial and feel no pain.” Samson bar Z to this motif in the next chapter. 72. See chapter 3. 73. “The fire burned as long as it took to reduce everything to ashes. If the bones did not burn, they were eventually ground to powder. Then either all remains were buried underneath the gallows or thrown into a river.” D¨ulmen, pp. 91–92.

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74. Mishnah Ta’anit 2.1: “They used to bring out the Ark into the open space in the town, and strew wood-ashes upon the Ark and upon the head of the President and on the head of the Chief of the Court; and every one there put some on his head.” Blackman, Mishnah Tractate Mo’ed, p. 415. 75. Sefer haEshkol, ed. Hanoch Albeck, pp. 50b–51a; and the Tur, Orahខ A Hayyim, p. 579. Maimonides describes similar practices in Hilkhot Ta’aniot 4:1. Michael Chernick of the Hebrew Union College in New York, who helped identify these sources, notes that both works are “works of practical halakhah”; private communication, March 1, 2000. 76. Wachtel. See also the following chapter.

SIX JONATHAN AND HIS MAGIC BOOK: PARIS 1290

I

N PARIS, in the year 1290, a struggling Jewish moneylender named Jonathan was accused of inflicting a series of tortures upon a communion wafer. A desperate and poverty-stricken client whose garment he held in pledge allegedly supplied the host. The Christian sources report that the wafer was boiled and stabbed, thrown in cold water and pierced with nails. It bled copiously, but miraculously defied destruction. When the Jew’s son ran into a nearby church to announce to the Christians their folly for adoring the tortured host, a good Christian woman, signo sancte crucis armavit, went to the Jewish household. Sensing help to hand, the wafer leaped into a small vessel she carried. The authorities were alerted, the Jews arrested and interrogated. Jonathan’s wife and children submitted to baptism, but Jonathan himself remained obdurate and was condemned to the stake.1 Although there is evidence that host libels were in circulation before 1290, the Paris 1290 incident set the standard against which subsequent desecration narratives took form.2 Contemporary accounts of the incident vary slightly, yet they agree on most critical details. According to one early version, a Latin liturgical lesson dated to about 1320, Jonathan made a curious last request. Led to the stake, he cried to the executioner: O me inquit iudeus, infelicem qui tam subito deprehensus arma mea mecum assumere non potui! (O, said the Jew, how wretched I am! for I was arrested so quickly that I could not take my arms/weapon with me!). To the executioner’s logical query, Jonathan continued: Habeo libellum quendam in domo mea repositum, quem si mecum tenerem deus vester non posset facere me comburi (I have a book in my house, and as long as I hold fast to it your God cannot cause me to be burnt). The prevˆot obligingly dispatched messengers to retrieve the “little book,” which was bound to Jonathan, and both were set afire. To the author’s gratification, and perhaps no one’s surprise, the Jew and his book were reduced to ashes with ease.3 Is the conclusion of the Christian narrative adequately explained by the Christian chronicler’s desire for literary justice, or does it tell us more? Certainly, as we have seen, Jewish victims of judicial violence in northern France had some history of claiming immunity to fire.4 The motif may be traced back approximately a century, to assertions that the bodies of the Jews martyred at Blois in 1171 were immune to flame. Moreover, Jon-

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athan’s arrest followed a series of burnings of Jewish books, beginning with the Talmud in Paris in 1242; the book burnings signal a growing tendency among Christians to regard Jewish books with suspicion. The 1320 account perhaps reflects this hostility and anticipates its later elaborations, in which the Jew’s book would increasingly evoke two sorts of associations—magic or the usurer’s ledger.5 Two early modern libels preserve illustrations of the former belief, and Paolo Uccello’s late fifteenthcentury depiction of the Paris libel displays the Jew’s ledger book prominently in the opening panel, although no book whatsoever is visible in the flames surrounding the Jews at the stake.6 For the Latin writer, this association of book and Jew may have thus been inevitable. However, the story reveals only contempt, not fear, for the inefficacious powers of the sacred tome. Jonathan’s faith in his book, like his faith in his God, are both fatal lapses in judgment to which he clings in perversity. The author of the account that contains this story was sensitive to this didactic theme, counterpointing the Jew’s request for his “weapon” (arma) with the description of the good Christian woman who “arms herself” correctly, with the sign of the Cross (signo sancte crucis armavit). Nonetheless, the “meaning” of Jonathan’s request is not restricted to what insights if offers into the imaginative world of late medieval Christians. These are notable: Over the next few centuries, the Paris incident inspired a number of Christian artists in various media and languages, from prose and drama to tapestry and fresco. The later representations contain variations on the original narrative, altering elements such as the number and assortment of Jews, the roles played by Jonathan’s family, the identity of the poor woman, servant, or avaricious merchant supplying the host, the order of the tortures, the discovery of the crime, and the final fate of the Jew’s wife and children. The motif of the book, however, survives in only two later accounts of the 1290 tale.7 Significantly, both accounts are not medieval texts but early modern; they reveal something about the motif of the Jew’s book as it evolved in Christian cultural narratives. The first of these sources is the late fifteenth-century polemical treatise of Alphonsus de Spina, the Fortalitium Fidei. De Spina apparently relied on the liturgical narrative (that includes the protective book motif) for his brief account of the story. According to de Spina, the Jew’s book is claimed to grant immortality to those who frequently read and own it (hij qui frequenter illum legent et possident).8 The same text supplied the author of Labb´e’s sixteenth-century chronicle with his language and material, which in somewhat abbreviated form echoes the narrative of the liturgical lessons.9 The second source is a late fifteenth-century vernacular play, La sainte hostie, which also evokes the language of the liturgical (or

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Labb´e’s derivative) text. The convicted Jew, whom the author calls “Moses,” asks the prevˆot for his book: Mais que ie puisse avoire mon livre Ie seray au pur & delivre De tes mains ie te declaire Que tu ne pourras meffaire Ne ton iesus ne sa puissance Ne me scauriez faire nuyssance Brief ne grever mon corps en rien.10 [If only I could have my book I would be absolutely delivered from your grasp. I declare to you that you could not do anything to me. Neither your Jesus nor his power would be able to harm me or injure my body in any way.] Both of these examples develop the motif of a magic book, tapping an iconographical detail undervalued in the many medieval accounts of the incident; in this regard, they contribute to a wealth of later narratives that explore this preoccupation in early modern Europe.11 But there is a second narrative trapped in the early liturgical description of Jonathan’s death, so that the motif of the Jew’s book tells us something about the imaginative world of medieval Jews as well as Christians. The book’s overall scarcity in the derivative accounts of the Paris 1290 host desecration suggests that it did not constitute an archetypal component of the desecration narrative. Since, on the other hand, there is evidence that incombustibility was attributed to some medieval Jewish martyrs, it is tempting to wonder if the Christian record could preserve a genuine request. For those who will insist that without proof that Jonathan or his book ever existed such a motival exploration is useless, I must disagree. Whether or not the chronicler’s tale is a literal representation of events— this is highly dubious, especially as this is not the overriding goal of liturgical narrative—is not this study’s concern. Certainly, it is a representation, one that draws on iconographical elements and narrative behaviors that a contemporary audience found both pleasing and plausible. In that representation, the Jewish martyr’s wish to die with his book may point to a counternarrative whose traces we can indeed locate among late thirteenth-century northern French Jews. In fact, the essential elements of those beliefs survived virtually intact over the next few centuries in the region.

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What if Jonathan, or a Jewish victim who became preserved as “Jonathan,” had said something that was subsequently reported (or misreported) in Christian accounts of his fate? If he was merely trying to delay his captors, there was little to gain with such a request—at most, a bit of time. If, however, Jonathan believed that he possessed a book that could save him from the flames, what book might he have meant? Alternatively, it is also possible that he did not literally believe this but said something that was misunderstood by the prevˆot. An idiomatic expression translated from Hebrew into Old French might have had one sort of reality to Jonathan and another for Christian listeners. In this regard, two related traditions come to mind: (1) Hebrew expressions that metaphorically represent the act of “clinging to Torah” as a source of life’ or (2) the A A well-known martyrological legend of R. Haninah (or Hananiah) b. Teradion, the second-century martyr bound and burned in a Torah scroll. A third option represents a combination of all of these possibilities. If Jonathan did believe in the power of some parchment or text to protect him from the fire, he may not have had in mind a specific amulet or codex designated for this purpose, but a more ordinary sort of text whose properties extended to prophylactic use. In this context, mezuzot and prayer phylacteries (tefillin), both containing parchment texts attributed protective powers, may deserve attention. Indeed, the custom of burying adult Jewish males with their phylacteries already invoked the symbolism of a righteous death. Such everyday ritual connections move us beyond the realm of literature as we usually consider it. Indeed, the motifs and models treated in the preceding chapters have been almost entirely based on a textual corpus, one that I have argued held a special appeal for the nimble minds of young men trained in the Tosafist schools. Nonetheless, the performance of these texts was not restricted to a learned audience. Rather, martyrological qinot (laments) and seliខhot (penitential hymns) were heard in the synagogue, on ritual fast days and holidays, as part of penitential liturgies in which the entire community took part. How the average Jewish man or woman experienced these liturgies we will never know. The martyrological laments that they included offered a substantive and affective education in the imagery and values of resistance to Christian pressure.12 Nonetheless, they were merely one means for reinforcing Jewish identity and institutions, and in terms of content, the linguistic challenges posed by some of the laments made them suitable for some kinds of listeners more than others. In the preceding chapters, I have claimed that the ideal audience for the laments as texts were the students and teachers who spent their days studying the literature on which the laments depended for allusion and depth. Yet in the end the students of the Tosafist masters, or for that matter the students of their Pietist rivals, were not the only kind of listener to hear these laments

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performed. Nor were they in numbers likely to account for the majority of even male listeners, men who experienced this poetry in their own ways and who responded to the martyrological ideal as one means of making sense of their world. Certainly the anecdotal material found in A works ranging from the Pietist anthology, known as the Sefer Hasidim, to sermonic and halakic exempla gives us some idea of the pervasiveness of martyrological imagery in medieval northern Europe, and of the ideological and didactic concerns concentrated in representations of the stalwart martyr. What our textual references too often lack, however, is any referent beyond the world of texts. However shaped by textual traditions it may be, the request attributed to Jonathan provides such a signal. As such, it bears elucidating, both as an illustration of the pervasiveness of martyrological motifs in medieval Jewish society and of the creative ways in which such motifs might be activated under real-life pressure. Let us explore the options we have listed. Had Jonathan truly believed he possessed a prophylactic book with the specific ability to conserve him from the flames, what might that book have been? Despite the parenthetical query of William C. Jordan (“of magic? the Talmud?”), there is little likelihood that a Talmud or other rabbinic text was implied.13 As for the Talmud itself, a multivolume work, the individual volumes would have been quite large and unwieldy. The Latin text specifies a “small book” (“libellus”), and it is difficult to visualize strapping an entire volume of Talmud, even in manuscript, to our ill-fated bibliophile. Moreover, in northern France a volume of Talmud would have been a rarity by 1290, after the ban on the Talmud in 1240, its public incineration in 1242, and subsequent renewals of both ban and burning.14 It is not obvious that Jonathan could have owned such a rare work.15 Modern scholars like Jordan and Langmuir may have been influenced by Alphonsus de Spina’s account, which does assume that Jonathan’s book was a Talmud (suo Thalamuth).16 Alphonsus, however, reflects the belief, well attested by his time, that the Talmud was full of magical formulas and heresies. These beliefs began to take form in the thirteenth century with the great trial and condemnation of the Talmud in Paris. Nonetheless, to a medieval Jew they would have been as absurd as they were alarming, as rabbinic literature per se is not and was not associated by Jews with such magical properties. Mystical beliefs and practices, of course, were no strangers to medieval northern European Jews.17 Many of the traditions they transmitted and sustained may be traced to the pre-Crusade period, and some attest to familiarity with the esoteric literature of the Hekhalot mystics as well. Although scholars have associated Ashkenazic interest in theurgic ritual and liturgy primarily with the German Pietiest movement, Ephraim Kanarfogel has demonstrated an affinity for esoteric practices among the

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northern French rabbis as well. In some instances, this affinity is demonstrated by esoteric readings of non-esoteric texts (such as the liturgy or the liturgical poetry, particularly of Eastern masters like the Kallir). In other instances, there is evidence for the popularity of outright mystical or magical texts such as the Sefer Raziel and the Shimmush Tehillim.18 Typically for the genre, both texts are compendiums.19 The first is an eclectic assortment of rabbinic, geonic, and medieval lore purporting to be transmitted to Adam by the angel Raziel and by Adam to subsequent initiates. The latter work collects a series of recipes for the “practical” use of the psalms to ward off, repair, or reverse various ailments and evils. Among its varied incantations and amulets for the predictably generic uses of inducing love and warding off evils, the Sefer Raziel does indeed number two specific fire incantations.20 One is a recipe for filling the conjurer’s house with smoke.21 The other commences with shemot—literally, “names”—here, the names of the seven angels who rule the domain of fire (Malkiel, Rafadiel, Gezariel, Emuniel, Areliel, Nuriel, and Izrael) and who must be conjured if one wishes to “throw something in fire, enter a fire or extinguish a fire.”22 Neither of these formulas calls for a book, amulet, or inscription of any sort. However, the prophylactic powers of magic books do not necessarily refer to their content. The frontispiece of early editions of the Sefer Raziel uniformly includes an assurance to the owner that, guarded with his other valuables, the book will keep his house from burning down.23 Moreover, the Sefer Raziel does include amulet formulas for protection from a catalogue of evils, including capture, war, forgetfulness, evil men, enchantment, persecution, and poverty.24 Still, nowhere does the preface or any part of the Sefer Raziel guarantee human incombustibility. As for the Shimmush Tehillim, this work, too, contains a variety of formulas for repelling enemies, robbers, tormentors, and “bad people” of the most generic sort. Several combinations of psalms offer protection against fire: 76 against fire or water (water being in fact the dominant source of imagery in the psalm); 148 so that a fire not cause damage; and 149 so that it not spread. There is no specific guarantee that the book itself might provide relief from life-threatening danger and particularly fire.25 Specific references to amulets in the text are not always reassuring: Ps. 83, for instance, when worn in battle will prevent the enemy from overcoming one. “But if he does overcome you (!), he will not cause harm.” Often appended to the Shimmush Tehillim are lists of detailed instructions for the use of amulets, psalm recitations, and magical, often homeopathic rituals for the easing of a litany of ailments, from stomachaches and poor vision to job insecurity and impotence. Again, none relies on a book and none recommends binding any kind of text to the wearer to protect against fire.

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How likely was Jonathan, in Paris of the late thirteenth century, to have sought final recourse in either of these texts? Both were popular, and Jonathan may well have owned a small psalter with the appended Shimmush Tehillim. But their practical use has never been associated with martyrdom. It is possible, of course, that Jonathan sought protection from the fire with an amulet intended specifically for this purpose. The word used in the Latin texts, libellus, can indeed refer to an amulet.26 The great medieval compendium of northern French liturgy and customs, the Maខhzor Vitry, describes the controversial practice among northern French Jews (roundly condemned by Maimonides) of writing angels’ names on mezuzot, and other amulets, as noted earlier, were believed to provide protection from a range of harms.27 Ephraim Kanarfogel has supplied us with illustrations of a prayer in use in thirteenth-century France that, invoking a litany of angels, requests protection from robbers, demons, dangerous people, warfare, famine, and “all the forms of persecution [gezerot—perhaps better translated here as tribulation] found in the world.”28 In addition, as Kanarfogel notes, variants or excerpts of these prayers were often included in medieval Ashkenazic liturgies, where they appear at the conclusion of the prayer service in a liturgical unit called the seder ha-ma’amadot. Among the German Pietists, the verses from this set of prayers beginning and concluding with the letter nun were also “recited as magical forms of protection,” demonstrating, among other things, ample evidence of interest among the rabbis of northern France, England, and Germany in “theurgic prayer” in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries.29 Nonetheless, I know of no medieval compendium from northern France or Germany that preserves a formula for a charm specifically used for the purpose of repelling fire. As we shall see below, at least one martyr from the early modern period does ask to don his phylacteries as he is led to the stake.30 The phylacteries, or tefillin, which contain parchment strips inscribed with biblical verses (Deut. 6:4–9, 11:13–21 and Exod. 13:1–10) were also visible affirmations of Jewish identity and routinely accompanied a Jewish man in burial. The Talmud specifically includes them among the sacred texts that must be rescued from a fire at the risk of one’s life.31 They are thus not associated with incombustibility themselves, nor with the protection of others from actual burning, unless of course “fire” refers to eternal punishment and not to an earthly blaze. I shall return to this point. Incombustibility, perhaps implicitly as an earthly anticipation of eternal reward, is a common motif in Christian martyrology, and documented in Jewish martyrology in northern France by the late twelfth century.32 As we saw in chapter 2, the iconography of the incombustible martyr had a strategic use, transforming the image of the auto-da-f´e into one of divine

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revelation. Moreover, from its inception, the figure of the unburnable martyr was wrought in the image of the scholarly elite, reinforcing religious authority as it consoled the stunned and bereaved. The prose accounts of the martyrdom of thirty-two Jews in Blois in 1171 referred to serefat ha-nefesh veha-guf qayyam—the life, or life-force, was extinguished but the bodies endured.33 The Blois accounts also described three Jews who leaped from the flames when the bonds about their hands burned through. The liturgical verse commemorations of the Blois martyrs paid special attention to this scene, shifting the emphasis of the prose sources on the intact corpses of the righteous to the resistance to flame manifested by three living martyrs. The motif of unburnability seems to have survived in subsequent Jewish martyrological lore. The Blois martyrdom itself made a profound impression on northern French Jews, and judging by the relatively great number of extant sources, this impression had longevity. An eyewitness memoir from 1268 describes a Jew in Paris who had converted and lived as a Christian for over two decades before reverting to the faith of his youth. The sincerity of the Jew’s initial conversion may be weighed by the fact that he had taken religious orders: Before his execution, he was stripped of some clerical status. By contrast, the sincerity of his reversion must be measured, not only by his own fate, but by his having persuaded two sons to be circumcised and join him as Jews. Condemned to the stake, the reverted Jew proclaimed boldly that even were he thrown into a fire kindled of “all the wood in the city of Paris,” he could not be burned. Burned, of course, he was.34 In martyrological poetry, the motif again surfaces in a late thirteenthcentury lament by Solomon Simhah ខ the Scribe, discussed in a different context in the preceding chapter. Significantly, Solomon’s poem brings us close in time and place to Jonathan: The lament “Shahar ខ avi’ todah” was written for the martyrs of Troyes, thirteen Jews burned at the stake following a blood libel in 1288. Here, too, the poet remarks: “Behold, I have made libation [to] my king,” said Solomon to God. “And to please Him, I have arranged my affairs. I bow on my knees to confess my transgressions, To illumine my darkness, I offer my head and my face, My hands and my feet—for in Him is my Source. I shall make libation with blood and tears. On the fiery altar, my heart is laid out, my soul [life] is my offering. My pain is nectar to my palate, and the fire of my tormentors has no power over me.”35

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The language of Solomon’s lament may strike the modern reader as bizarre. In light of the poet’s own theosophic system, which stresses the immanence of the divine spirit, the verses may describe the liberation of the spirit from the constraints of human form. Centuries later, Mallarm´e would give voice to the same idea in his lyrical description of John the Baptist’s severed head soaring through the air.36 For our purposes, Solomon’s poem confirms the survival of the motif of incombustibility as a literary convention in Jonathan’s time, and reinforces the anecdotal evidence (preserved in the Christian records) of a Jewish belief in the incorruptibility of the martyr’s body in flame. Such a belief may have informed the thinking of Parisian Jews like Jonathan. The correlative belief that the martyr was immune to pain is preserved in the responsa of R. Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg, Solomon’s teacher; a somewhat later text preserved in the curious Megillat Amrafel not only offers meditation techniques to block the pain of torture but a sort of mantra as well.37 Still, in all of these cases the absence of any mention whatsoever of any book or written text in the possession of unburned bodies is striking—striking enough to suggest that we return to the book itself. As we saw in chapter 4, Jewish martyrological literature, both prose and poetry, from the First Crusade down through the Rindfleisch massacres at the close of the thirteenth century, frequently includes references to the desecration of Torah scrolls and sacred texts. The descriptions have a typological sameness. Almost ubiquitously, they emphasize the physical violence inflicted upon the holy texts, which are inert, inanimate, and realistically enough, defenseless. The texts describe tearing, trampling, and burning of Torah scrolls by mobs intent upon desecration and mockery. The surviving documents for the Blois and York massacres (1171 and 1190, respectively) refer to the Jewish ransom of sacred books after the violence has calmed. Occasionally, like the righteous human martyrs, the parchment victims return to God, borne aloft by the smoke from the pyre. In a First Crusade lament by Qalonymos bar Judah that seems to have been well known throughout this period, the Torah: ascends to heaven her dwelling place with her wrapping and covers and the ones who studied her.38 In two laments, the desecrated scrolls are converted into other objects, perhaps drum covers? and shoes for lepers.39 In the lament for the Jews of Speyer killed in 1196 in the wake of the Third Crusade, the desecration of the sefarim (books in general, and perhaps not just Torah scrolls) includes defacing the Holy Name.40 A lament for R. Uri bar Joel haLevi, burned in Cologne in 1216, includes an allusion that in the context of the poem implies that the victim was burned with a Torah scroll. The verses read:

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Behold “my light” [“Uri”] has been burned in the fire His soul bound up in the bonds of Life, in the right hand of my Helper.41 Prior to these verses, the poet had lamented, “O God, look and see Your Torah which they have defiled!” (v. 21), suggesting that a Torah was desecrated or burned along with the martyr. Nonetheless, if biខzror ha-ខhayyim zខ erurah (literally, “wrapped in the bonds of [eternal] Life”) is to be understood as “wrapped in a Torah,” it clearly did Uri (who was also dismembered) no good.42 Similarly, book and martyr are joined in a lament by Baruch of Mainz (d. 1221) for the thirty-two martyrs of Blois burned in 1171. Verses 109–12 read: Ask the letters which were likened to fire flying upwards [about] the community sealed in learning with the Torah scroll Their Maker on High attended to their burning together He who blows the fire of the coals and produces a weapon for His purpose.43 For the Blois incident, however, we have a number of sources. These include the letter of R. Nathan bar Meshullam, the representative of the Parisian Jews sent to ransom the Jews’ sacred books after the fire.44 So the Jews were not burned with their holy books at Blois (and indeed no other source implies as much), and Baruch of Mainz was invoking a martyrological topos, as we shall see. In sum, no magical powers of survival, even pertaining to their own preservation, are attached to Jewish sacred books in their martyrology. On the contrary, what is emphasized, and with great pathos, is the frailty of the physical text, the desecration and martyrdom of the books as well as their readers. In one grim tableau, included in Ephraim of Bonn’s account of a Second Crusade attack on the Jews of Wurzburg, the rabbi Isaac ben Elyaqim is “slain over his book” with his twenty-one students.45 The scrolls, curiously, are like women—both are dragged forth from their “houses,” and both are exposed, violated, and ripped open, their precious contents spilled upon the earth.46 The image of the talmid hខ akham (student) also embraces this typology. In all three cases, the authors illustrate the terrible vulnerability of learning and its human and parchment vessels before the enemy’s sword, and in this sense there appears to be no precedent for Jonathan to have hoped that a book might save him from death. But perhaps he did not mean a physical book at all? Indeed, a long tradition of metaphoric usage comes to mind. The Hebrew Bible itself established a linguistic connection between verbs of “clinging” or “holding fast” and God or his Law. The relevant verbs derive from the roots

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ecs, zjt and ezj. In a number of biblical verses, some form of the expression vayiddabeq badonai (he clung to God, here I Kings 18:6, cf. also Ps. 63:9, Deut. 11:22 and 13:8, Josh. 22:5 and 23:8) links a verb of clinging to God himself. The Deut. 11:22 passage, lalekhet bekhol derakhav uledavqah bo (to walk in all his ways and cling to him) was included in the daily liturgy. In related passages, the subject clings to God’s law (Ps. 119:31—davaqti be-‘eduteikha), justice (Deut. 32:41—vetoខhaz bemishpat adonai), and covenant (Isa. 56:4, 6—ha-maខhaziqin bivriti). The extended metaphor developed in Prov. 3, in which Wisdom is compared to a tree, climaxes in Prov. 3:18 with the words “it is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it” (‘eខz hខ ayyim hi la-maខhaziqin bah); rabbinic and medieval readings routinely read “Wisdom” as “Torah.” This image, too, formed part of the daily liturgy. The connection reverberates throughout the rabbinic literature as well. Sometimes it is a loose connection, as in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubbot 111b, where a discussion of whether the “light of Torah” will raise the dead or not concludes that for those who “cling to the Lord” (Deut. 4) there is a promise of life. Uneasy with such guarantees, the midrashic commentary Numbers Rabbah emends: The Torah is life, as it is said, “it is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it.” For it is life to those who find it and will heal their bodies. The sons of Kohat would hold fast to the Torah which is life—this means the ark they carried which held the Torah. (Num. 5:17)47 In medieval Ashkenaz, this metaphor retained vigor. In the chronicle known as the 1007 Anonymous, we read veyeខhazzqu libbam beloheihem (their hearts held fast to their Lord), echoed in the First Crusade chronicler’s tafsu beyadam emunot avoteihem (they grasped the faith of their ancestors).48 Solomon bar Samson’s chronicle relishes variants of this idiom, such as davqu bevor’am (they clung to their Creator).49 In the anonymous Third Crusade lament’s contrasting image, you [Christians] cling to / a god of abomination, While we hold fast to the living God.50 And from about the same time (1191), we find the idiom in Joseph of Chartres’ lament for the martyrs of York: Instead of their herds, they sacrificed their children. They slaughtered their firstborn before their eyes. These saints did not withhold their only children from You, for they held onto the deeds of their ancestors.51

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The expression tofsei-Torah (“graspers of Torah”—i.e., students) was concentrated in medieval Ashkenaz and northern French usage. A search of the Bar Ilan data base, the comprehensive computer index to rabbinic and legal literature, yielded six citations from medieval responsa, from the works of Meir of Rothenburg, Isaac of Dampierre, and Joseph of Cologne, plus one citation from Rashi’s commentary to Jer. 2:5. The idiom appears also in Gershom bar Isaac’s poetic lament for the Blois martyrs, 52 A The linguistic conand it is known to the writers of the Sefer Hasidim. nection—and with it the image of holding to a book (Torah) as a source of life—seems to have held throughout the medieval period. It might easily have come to a northern French Jew’s mind. All of these expressions point to a metaphoric linkage rooted in biblical usage and alive well into the time of Jonathan’s life and death. Indeed, the midrash Tanខhuma, a popular exegetical text Jonathan could have known or heard, develops the metaphor literally: What shall a man do [but] busy himself with Torah that he might live. And if he does not know how to study [leshannot] let him recite [liqro’], and if he does not know how to recite, let him hold fast to the Torah and live [yeខhazzeq baTorah veyeខhiyeh], as it is said, “it is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it” [Prov. 3:18]. If he is not a student of Torah, let him hold fast to the book and to the teacher, those who teach Torah, and he will merit life . . . but if he is a student of Torah, the Torah will heal him from all evil and pain.53 Since, ultimately, the guarantee of Torah is eternal life, the reward of the righteous after death, so too we might assume that the “fire” from which the Torah saves is not an earthly fire but the hellfire of the world beyond. Like their Christian neighbors, medieval Jews envisioned fire and brimstone as the landscape of hell.54 This imagery undoubtedly reverberated in Christian and Jewish responses to the sight of the auto-da-f´e —responses moreover intended by the orchestrators of the execution spectacle.55 Is it not possible, then, that the Latin text preserves the trace of a Hebrew idiomatic usage, translated by Jonathan into spoken French? Having refused to admit guilt or convert under interrogation and torture, perhaps Jonathan uttered a final, stubborn assertion of faith? And if that assertion relied on the image of “holding fast to Torah,” perhaps his Christian interlocutors misunderstood him and took the expression literally to mean a real book? If so, then the Latin record preserves, unwittingly, the victim’s voice—an appealing explanation of the baffling detail of the book. The problem, of course, with this explanation is in Jonathan’s explicit reference to a specific and material book. “Habeo librum in domo mea,” the Latin reads, “quem si mecum haberem, Deus vester non posset me facere

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comburi.” This does not sound like metaphor, however much metaphor may (indeed, must) have reinforced the literal request. And so we turn to another possibility. What if Jonathan did not think his book would save him from burning, but he wanted to die holding onto it anyhow? What if he thought that was how a Jewish martyr’s death looked? Is there a tradition associating books and the martyr’s death? A famous set of martyrological texts from the rabbinic period contains the stories of the “Ten Martyrs,” a list of ten Jewish martyrs purportedly felled by the Romans. Versions of the stories are preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zara 18, and in the midrashic text, Abot derabbi Natan, sec. 35. An otherwise unknown poet named Judah composed the long verse lament known as the “Eleh Ezqerah,” which describes the Ten Martyrs’ deaths. These texts were all known to medieval readers; following the Second Crusade, moreover, Ephraim of Bonn wrote an original poetic version of the “Eleh ezqerah.” In many respects, the Ten Martyrs establish a number of Jewish martyrological conventions that found new life in medieval Jewish chronicles and poems of persecution. The martyrdom of Rabbi Akiba, for instance, who dies reciting the Shema’ while the executioner rakes his back with an iron fork, reverberates in the repeated references to Crusade martyrs reA A citing this prayer. Similarly, the martyrdom of R. Haninah (or Hananiah) b. Teradion had a long projection into Jewish martyrological thinking. Arrested during the Hadrianic persecutions for teaching Torah in public, A Haninah b. Teradian was brought to be burned: They brought him and wrapped him in the Torah scroll and surrounded him with bundles of twigs with which they lit the fire. They brought wads of cotton that had been soaked in water and put them on his heart so that he would not die quickly. His daughter said to him: Father, must I see you thus? He said to her: were I to be burned alone, it would be hard for me, but now I am being burned along with the Torah. When someone comes to avenge the insult done to the Torah, he will avenge mine as well. His students said to him, my master, what do you see? He said to them: the parchment is burning and the letters fly up into the air.56 The verse account in the “Eleh Ezqerah” preserves the essential details of the narrative. In addition, Lamentations Rabbah, a midrashic collection, contains another story of martyrs wrapped in their books and burned. The story appears twice in the midrash, with a variant in the Talmud: R. Simeon b. Gamaliel said, there were 500 schools in Betar, and the smallest of them had not less than 300 children. They used to say,

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“If the enemy comes against us, with these styluses we will go out and stab them!” When, however, in consequence of the people’s sins the enemy did come, they wrapped each pupil in his book and burnt him so that I alone was left.57 A The story of Haninah b. Teradion in particular resurfaces in medieval Hebrew martyrology. In Eliezer derabbi Nathan’s poetic lament for the First Crusade martyrs, he evokes the talmudic version explicitly: The tormentors desecrated the Torah scrolls and destroyed those who sought Her [⳱ Torah], who are dearer than pearls Avenge your insult and the lives of these mighty ones!58 And in a verse lament from the Second Crusade, by R. Isaac bar Shalom, we find again: Pages and parchment were given to the sword And the sacred letters went flying aloft The script of God carved on the tablets.59 So, too, Joseph of Chartres in his lament for the martyrs of York (1191): When My sages were gathered [to heaven] and My books rolled up, The letters were flying and the parchment was burned.60 Clearly by the mid–twelfth century the story of the second-century martyr had been incorporated into the repertoire of martyrological images that constituted the medieval genre. In one form or another, Jonathan could easily have known of this legend and understood it to offer a martyrological gesture of resistance and faith. But does this adequately explain our book? After all, Jonathan was not A Haninah b. Teradion, arrested for teaching the scroll of the Law in a Roman marketplace. He was a Parisian Jew arrested in the home and shop where he made an uneasy living as a moneylender whose clients were sometimes reduced to offering their garments as their surety. The defiance and conviction of his final request suggest the availability of an iconographic tradition and a set of medieval substitutes for its key elements. Indeed, the typology of idealized martyrdom had to exploit the recognizable symbols of medieval Jewish life. The historian Israel Yuval has provided one dramatic illustration in his study of the ritual drops of wine used to indicate the ten biblical plagues at the Passover seder.61 Surely other objects with Jewish ritual associations—slaughtering knives, or ritual ashes, circumcision cloths and the performed liturgy with its music and gestures—must have fused key symbols of contemporary life with martyrological motifs.62 That this might happen to dramatic effect is illustrated by the story of

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Raphael Levy, a French Jewish merchant burned in Metz in 1669.63 Although Levy’s tragic story unfolded many years after the episode in Paris, it testifies to the enduring quality of some of its motifs. Accused of kidnapping the three-year-old son of Gilles and Mangeote Le Moine and ritually murdering him, Levy returned from his hometown of Boulay at the behest of Metz Jews, who advised him to appeal to the Metz authorities before the trouble spread. Imprisoned, Levy continued to receive letters from fellow Jews during the time he and other “witnesses” were questioned.64 The letters were eventually confiscated and entered as evidence against him. One of them offered the following curious advice: In case (God forbid) they wish to torture you, you must say this three times: I am a Jew, a Jew am I. I live a Jew, a Jew I live. I die a Jew, a Jew I die.65 Prior to his interrogation and torture, the official trial record reports that Levy did in fact recite something three times. He was also observed to remove a book from his pocket in the torture chamber, and when asked, he admitted that it contained words similar to those he had been instructed to say. The Christian account of the trial continues: When they wished to bring him to the execution, he tied two leather bands, knotted in the middle, around his head and left arm. . . . The court clerk of the Parlement having asked why he had tied these things and what they signified, he answered that within the knot were the commandments of the Law and that Jews traditionally tied them about their head when at the point of death. Thinking this might again be some sort of sorcery or charm, the court clerk removed the two leather bands from the criminal.66 According to the Jewish account, “they would not let him put his phylacteries on his head: near the scaffold they removed them and gave them to a guard.”67 Late though it is, and characteristically early modern in its attitudes toward witchcraft, Raphael Levy’s story attests to the continuity of martyrological beliefs of medieval origin. The “prayer” or charm uttered by the condemned man is a variation on the mantra recommended by the medieval Megillat Amrafel as an aid in resisting torture: Behold, I am a Jew. A Jew I shall live, a Jew I shall die. Jew, Jew, Jew.68 As we have seen in earlier chapters, the Megillat Amrafel also had precedents, some claiming the physical indestructibility of the martyr’s body and some asserting the martyr’s imperviousness to pain. The latter tradition, which echoes in the seventeenth-century trial transcript, apparently had a long life. In this regard, we might consider Levy’s use of his tefillin as well. In addition to the liturgical text, only one late account of the 1290

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incident suggested that Jonathan’s text was an actual codex. As mentioned, Alphonsus de Spina’s late fifteenth-century record of Jonathan’s “crime” described the Jew’s book as a “Talmud,” inherited by Jonathan from his father and possessing the power to grant him immortality.69 The liturgical account emphasized a “book” that functioned as an anti-type of the eucharist; the book’s failure to protect the user from fire (on earth and in hell) was counterpointed by the wafer’s resistance to flame and its offer of salvation to Christian believers. From this Christian perspective, if what Jonathan wanted were his tefillin, whether or not he attributed apotropaic powers to them, they certainly could have attracted Christian attention. Even if he meant only to die as a Jewish male should die, wearing his tefillin, then as in the case of Raphael Levy, his oppressors may have mistaken his strange-looking text for a magical charm. What if, alternatively, Jewish martyrological iconography had conscripted the traditional symbolism of the tefillin? According to Moses of Coucy, a thirteenth-century rabbinic scholar, the identifying marks of the medieval Jew were Sabbath observance, male circumcision, and the wearing of tefillin.70 And, as noted, medieval northern French Jews did attribute mystical properties to both the mezuzah and the phylactery scrolls. A They might have “seen” the legend of Haninah b. Teradian in medieval costume, translating the scroll of the rabbinic martyr into the strip of parchment central to medieval Jewish identity. Surely it is possible that Jonathan was not just interested in appearances, but that he believed phylacteries would protect him from the fires of Paris as well as the fires of hell. Minimally, he could avert the latter—and who could deny to a man in Jonathan’s dire situation the consolation of his hope in heavenly reward? The story of Jonathan the Jew retained its drama for Christian audiences for many years, for whom it became known as the miracle of “les Billettes” (after the chapel built on the site of the purported desecration). In Paris, the 1290 host libel inspired a local cult and a wave of “copycat” accusations in the region over the next few decades.71 It also established the standard form of the desecration narrative, in life and in art, and was the catalyst for an international incident in the early nineteenth century.72 In this chapter, I have suggested that a Jewish counternarrative may be preserved in the representation of Jonathan and his last request, too. Moreover, the Jewish beliefs and attitudes revealed in the course of this exploration are not ultimately dependent upon the historicity of the incident or the accuracy of the early liturgical account.73 Rather, I have tried to identify a pervasive set of symbols and beliefs that may illuminate the world and material culture in which a story like Jonathan’s could, indeed may, have unfolded.74 We have noted other hints of this world in the poetry examined in

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preceding chapters. In the lament for Samson of Metz, for instance, the allusion to ashes may signal their use in penitential fast-day liturgies—an ancient custom, to be sure, but recharged by the imagery of martyrdom.75 Sumptuary restrictons, such as those prescribed (not necessarily observed) after the Blois martyrdom in 1171, and ritual visits to the graves of the saints and holy martyrs are mentioned in the chronicles, customary books, and exempla.76 And the attempts of the rabbis to suppress certain types of activities suggest other types of symbolic resources. Surely the “relics” of the holy martyrs—ranging from the knives or implements that were used to kill them (or with which they slew themselves) to the bloody clothing in which they died—played some role in popular, if not official, Jewish life.77 Significantly, liturgical rituals involving the use of wine or blood also underwent changes during this period.78 The ending of the practice of displaying the circumcision cloth over the synagogue door in medieval Ashkenaz suggests Jewish apprehensions that Christian eyes might misread the symbolic display.79 The potent symbolism of bloodied fabric recalls also the motif of God’s bloodied coat—the porphyria of rabbinic legend—common in the martyrological and penitential hymns from this period and explored by the historian Israel Yuval. According to Yuval, this image of vengeance represented the dramatic adaptation of a marginal rabbinic motif to suit the martyrological thinking of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.80 Perhaps this image, too, was not merely metaphor. It is tempting to wonder if the bloodied assurance of God’s vengeance did not have some real-life referent, a bit of clothing or bloodied cloth on display, to illustrate the theological point.81 If this sounds too much like the Christian uses of holy relics, well it might: No more and no less might be expected from the complex social interactions that characterized medieval Jewish engagement with the Christian world. All of these elements, including the poetry—poetry as a living, musical, dramatic performance—constituted a symbolic frame of reference in which central issues of Jewish identity were formulated.82 In Christian representations, the Paris legend achieved astonishing popularity, passing rapidly to Italy and England and to representations in French, Latin, Italian, and English, not to mention prose, drama, painting, stained glass, and tapestry.83 Among the most famed of these representations is a series of paintings done by Paolo Uccello for the ducal palace in Urbino in the late 1460s.84 Uccello has altered several elements of the narrative: The entire Jewish family is burned at the stake, and it is the blood of the boiled or broiled wafer that leads the soldiers to the scene of the “crime.” The vitality of the basic plot was impressive, although its emphases shifted over time. The farcical Croxton mystery play, written after 1461, has a greedy Christian merchant supply the wafer, and all the Jews—Jonathan, his family, and the entire community—repent

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and convert. Of course, in 1290, the year Jonathan was condemned to the pyre, the Jews of England were expelled. When the Croxton play was written, therefore, there were no Jews in England. As noted earlier, the motif of the book gently eroded as a narrative element in either Christian libel narratives or Jewish accounts of martyrdom. Did, then, Jonathan’s request for his book fail? Had he believed in its efficacy to save him, as the Christian account depicts him, it apparently did. If he wished to impress his tormentors with an image of Jewish tenacity for Torah, then judging by their lack of comprehension, it failed again. Where the magic “book” succeeded, however, is in signaling the presence of Jewish martyrological conventions that drew on rabbinic material but were shaped by the Hebrew cultural and literary experience of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Jonathan died as he enacted a wellknown image of a Jewish martyr’s death, holding fast to a “book” that in some way embodied “Torah.” In some way, he believed that book would protect him from the auto-da-f´e. The magic “book” may have been Jonathan’s phylacteries, or Jonathan may have had a more conventional book in mind, for instance a small psalter such as those attached to the Shimmush Tehillim. Less likely, but possible, too, was a small Pentateuch. Even if he did not own many books, a Jew with two children and a business that demanded some literacy would have likely owned a Pentateuch, especially as the education of Jewish children began with the biblical text. While many of the whole or partial texts of Hebrew Bibles that survive from this period and region are large and valuable, smaller copies existed also. Psalters were often small. They are not, technically, “Torah,” but one can imagine Jonathan applying the term generically. The records examined by Colette Sirat on book holdings for this period indicate a strong preference for the Pentateuch, psalters, or rabbinic legal compendia.85 By 1290, it would have taken some powerful magic to forestall the turmoil and expulsion to come. Nonetheless, our story conveys how much—in their own minds and in their persecutors’—French Jews were attached to their books. Were they not, the story we have tried to trace in these chapters would have been impossible to recover. The story of Jonathan the Jew also permits us a glimpse of a rich imaginative and symbolic world whose elements mingle rabbinic traditions, Christian hagiographical tropes, and martyrological conventions wrought by medieval Jewish circumstances and texts. That rich combination has, from different angles and in different stages of evolution, been the subject of each of the studies that constitutes this book. As it is, the often turbulent existence of northern French Jews during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has left us less textual evidence than we would like. To a great extent, the fate of the Jew remained bound up in the fate of his books—and in some

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ways that has made the task of reconstruction harder. Nonetheless, the poetry and symbolic rituals that have formed the basis of these studies have not proven such poor resources after all. Certainly, as resources, they have been patient. And I, for one, am grateful that, if unfortunately not in the case of Jonathan, overall they have shown a remarkable resistance to flame.

Notes 1. Miri Rubin lists the primary sources in her extended treatment of the incident. See her “Desecration of the Host,” pp. 169–87, and more recently, Gentile Tales. For a thorough discussion of the chronology of the sources and their interrelationships, see the dissertation of Joanie Dehullu, pp. 26–45, and the Latin texts on pp. 146–50. I am grateful to Emily Kadens of Princeton University for her generous help in procuring a copy of the dissertation and targeting the relevant discussion. As Dehullu’s study clarifies, the better-known accounts, listed hereafter, are derivative: see the Receuil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (RHGF): “De miraculo hostiae a Judaeo Parisiis anno Domini MCCXC multis ignominiis effectatae,” vol. 22, pp. 32–33; “Ex brevi chronicico Ecclesiae S. Dyonissii ad cyclos paschales,” vol. 23, p. 145; “Extrait d’une chronique anonyme finissant en MCCCLXXX,” vol. 21, pp. 123–30; “Extrait d’une chronique anonyme fran¸caise, finissant en MCCCVIII,” vol. 21, pp. 132–33; “Chroniques de Saint-Denis depuis 1285 jusqu’en 1328,” vol. 20, pp. 654–724. The incident and sources are also discussed in Chazan, 1973a, pp. 181–82; Jordan, 1989, pp. 192–93; Baron, vol. 9, pp. 168–69. My thanks also to Hebrew Union College graduate students Charles Ramsey and Ting Wang for their help with the Latin text. 2. Rubin, 1992. 3. See the account preserved in Dehullu as text D, located in Paris A.N., L 663, no. 1. 4. See chapter 2. 5. Jordan, 1989, p. 140; and 1992, pp. 62–76, especially p. 75. The later tendency to associate Christian heretics and witches with “bad” or magic books is perhaps an evolution of this linkage. See Kieckhefer, pp. 310–38, and notice the recurring motif of the magic book in his examples. 6. The case of the court Jew Lippold of Brandenburg (1573) and Raphael Levy in Metz (1669) will be discussed below. For illustrations of the Uccello panels, see either Miri Rubin, 1999, or Lavin. 7. I refer specifically to accounts of the 1290 incident. Other accusations of host desecration occasionally refer to the targeting of Jewish books for violence, such as the 1389 Prague incident cited by Miri Rubin (1999, p. 135), where the books of the Jews are heaped with a crown of thorns and burned (separately from the human victims). 8. de Spina, not after 1471, Book 3, Consideratio 9, ii (“Secundo expulsio”). 9. “De miraculo hostiae . . .” RHGF 22:32–33.

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10. The play is mentioned in “Les Myst`eres” (Paris: Hachette, 1880) (Historie du theˆatre en France au moyen aˆ ge). Professors Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler have graciously made available their transcription of their forthcoming critical edition, which relies on two early printed editions, Le Jeu et Mystere de la saincte Hostie par personnages (Paris: Jean Bonfons, 1547–66), and Le mistere de la saincte hostie (Paris: Jean II Trepparel or Alain Lotrian, ca. 1531), f. 30v. The editions are listed respectively as Paris, Bibl. Nat., R´es Y. 2915 and Aix, Bibl. M´ejanes, R´es. S.60. For some discussion of the manuscript history, see their 1999 article, and especially p. 86, n. 62. 11. See Stuart Clark. Conversations with Professor Clark at the National Humanities Center in the spring of 2000 have been helpful in mapping out the methodological issues at stake in this discussion. Any subsequent flaws in the application of his suggestions are entirely my own. 12. I understand the performative role of the laments as a ritual experience as well as a textual one. See Tambiah. 13. Jordan, 1989, p. 193. The idea is echoed by Gavin Langmuir (who otherwise takes issue with Jordan’s reliance on the Latin narrative): “[T]he Jew is burned unrepentant, despite his claim that a book he had [presumably the Talmud was meant] would save him from burning.” Langmuir, 1996], citing from p. 301. 14. See chapter 3. The initial ban of 1242 led to the famous public burning of the Talmud in Paris; there were additional confiscations of Hebrew books throughout the remainder of the thirteenth century. See Baron, 9:67; Chazan, 1973a, pp. 143–44; and Jordan, 1989, p. 139; 1992, pp. 69–70. 15. For some indication of the value and distribution of Hebrew books in this period, see Sirat, 1992. However, it is worth noting that, precisely because of their great value, Hebrew books were often offered as pledges for loans, cf. p. 226. 16. Alphonsus de Spina, Liber 3, Consideratio 9, ii. 17. Ephraim Kanarfogel’s recent study illuminates the degree to which even the “rationalist” Tosafist scholars may be included among the believers in mystical doctrines. See Kanarfogel, 2000. 18. The editions of the Sefer Raziel consulted were Warsaw, 1812 (reprinted in Jerusalem: 1976); Rodelheim, 1865; and Brooklyn, 1949. The Sefer Raziel hamal’akh is a composite work, including among other things the introduction to the Sefer ha-razim, described by Michael Swartz as “an early handbook of magic pieced together from Genizah fragments and other medieval manuscripts” generally dated from the third to the sixth centuries. See Swartz, p. 191. For the Shimmush Tehillim, I consulted the 1660 Sabionetta edition, from the rare book collection of the Klau library, Hebrew Union College–Cincinnati; the Jerusalem 1993 reprint of the Sabionetta edition; and the combined Sefer Rafael haMal’akh, qontres Shimmush Tehillim, ed. Rosenberg (n.p. 1966). 19. Most medieval Jewish books of this period were anthologies. See Sirat, 1992, p. 218; and Yassif, 1997. 20. “Predictably generic,” of course, to us. It is in fact noteworthy that so many of the medieval magical formulas include love spells, romantic love being yet another cultural obsession associated with developments in the twelfth through thirteenth centuries.

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21. In the 1976 edition, p. 47b. 22. Ibid., p. 8. 23. As Swartz points out (p. 175), “the power of the magical book or mystical treatise) . . . is found in introductions to Hekhalot texts and magic books.” The frontispiece of the Sefer Raziel reads, in my translation: “ [this book] is a protection (segullah) to all the house of Israel . . . for success, blessing and to extinguish fire originating in the domain of fire (esh hama’arakhah), that it not reign in his house, and so that no stranger or evil dwell in his abode. Whoever has this awesome and holy book hidden with his valuables will find it is his salvation when he is sick or in trouble, and to this all the children of Torah will attest” (1812 edition; the 1949 varies slightly but insignficantly). 24. See, e.g., the excerpts in Kanarfogel, 2000, p. 182 (citing from the Amsterdam 1701 edition, p. 144). 25. Heymann, especially the section entitled “De L’Utilisation superstitieuse des mezuzot et des tefilin; les amulettes et l’utilisation des psaumes,” pp. 111– 12. Heymann’s treatment is inadequate and in some ways naive, but deserves note. 26. Skemer, pp. 254–305, and see esp. p. 270, n. 55. 27. For the mezuzah, see the Maខhzor Vitry of Rabbenu Simខhah ben Samuel, ed. Berliner, par. 515, pp. 647–49. The custom was prevalent in the Rhenish communities also; see the treatment in Daniel Sperber, vol. 2 , pp. 104–106. The pratice of inscribing the names of angels, saints (including martyrs?) or other verses on the inside of the mezuzah parchment was condemned by Maimonides; see his Hilkhot Tefillin 5:4, and the discussion toward the end of this chapter. A Heyman relies exclusively on the Sefer Hasidim for his claim that phylacteries also served as amulets; see also Kanarfogel, 2000, chap. 3. 28. Kanarfogel, 2000, pp. 172–76. I cite from the version quoted on p. 176, n. 102, from Paris 391 (a fourteenth-century Ashkenazic text), f.69r. 29. Ibid., pp. 178, 183; Urbach, 1973. 30. Reinach; and see the discussion below. 31. B. Shabbat 115b; Heymann, p. 114. 32. The Blois laments mark its appearance in Jewish martyrology; see chapter 2. For the Christian phenomenon, see Head, 2000a. For some examples, see Jacobus de Voragine, for instance the stories of Saints Christina, Adrian, Euphemia, Cosmas, and Damian. The official records of the execution of Jeanne d’Arc include the claim by the executioner that her heart did not burn; see Pernoud, p. 277; Pernoud draws on the Vie et Mort de Jeanne d’Arc: Les T´emoignages du proc`es de r´ehabilitation, 1410–1456 (Paris: 1953). For a charming discussion of a later manifestation of this belief, see Scribner. 33. Nefesh may of course be translated in postbiblical usage as “soul,” but the expression here in no way implies that the “soul” as a medieval Jew would have understood it was destructible. Rather, the bodies are inert and lifeless but intact. 34. The story is preserved in a manuscript transcribed in part by Delisle, 1877, p. 189, and briefly described in Chazan, 1973a, pp. 146–47. 35. Solomon Simhah ខ haSofer, “Shahar ខ avi’ todah,” in Darmesteter, 1881, pp. 227–29; also in Habermann, 1945a, p. 207, and see the fuller treatment of this poem in chapter 5.

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36. Mallarm´e, pp. 42–46. The head, which speaks in the poem, describes how it soars triumphantly (“dans les vols triomphaux”): Comme rupture franche Plutˆot refoule ou tranche Les anciens d´esaccords Avec le corps [as the downright rupture represses or cuts rather the primordial clash with the flesh] 37. For Meir of Rothenburg, see Samson bar Tsadoq, par. 415; and note the clarification concerning the transmission of the text in Tamar, pp. 376–80. The idea is repeated in the sermons of the Spanish rabbi Isaac Aboab of the late fifteenth century and those of Saul Morteira in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; see Saperstein, pp. 300, 325, and 390 for the English; and pp. 358, 404 for the Hebrew. For the Megillat Amrafel see Scholem, and the discussion below. 38. Habermann, 1945a p. 68, vv. 53–54. 39. Meir of Rothenburg, “Ahbirah ខ milin,” in Habermann, 1945a, pp. 181– 83. The tripartite verse reads: vkdnv kf o, sg q vkkj,b kzrc arjku ,ukujnu ohp,k q vkft l,kdnu l,ru, xfy It seems to me possible to read this, alternatively, as meaning that the Torah was “consumed” (destroyed) to the sound of drums and dancing etc. The other image is clearer. In an anonymous lament for the martyrs of 1096, the poet writes, The gift of delight, famed books of laws, Planted in the tent, dishevelled and hung on sticks, Finally made into the tops of shoes for lepers’ feet— For these I weep and my eyes are drenched with water. See the excerpt in Bernfeld, 1:209 (no. 31). 40. Bernfeld, 1:254. 41. Ibid., 1:258; also see Schirmann, 1939, pp. 24–25. Kanarfogel (2000, p. 165) mentions the curious legend attached to this poem, according to which the dead martyr composed it himself and transmitted it in a dream to R. Mordecai b. Eliezer. 42. Much later, in 1573, we find the gripping story of Lippold, court Jew to the elector Joachim of Brandenberg. Apparently a harsh user of men in his own right as well as on behalf of his profligate patron, Lippold was known to dabble in alchemy, a hobby of Joachim’s as well. Accused of poisoning Joachim in 1571, Lippold was tried and acquitted, but rearrested two years later after a strange argument overheard by detractors, in which his wife accused him of possessing a “magic book.” Lippold was brutally tortured, confessed then recanted, and executed—broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, and finally burned with his book. The incident illustrates the early modern preoccupation with magic, magic books, and their association with Jews and other “heretics.” See Trachtenberg, 83ff.; Kohut.

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43. Baruch of Magenza (Mainz), “Esh okhlah esh,” pp. 133–40. 44. Neubauer and Stern, p. 34. 45. Habermann, 1945a, p. 119 ⳱ Ephraim of Bonn, Sefer Zekhirah, p. 123. 46. The typology draws on Lamentations, especially Lam. 2:20 and its early liturgical verse echoes. See, for instance, the lament of the Kallir beginning “Im tokhalnah nashim piryan” in Rosenfeld, pp. 120–21. See also Einbinder, 2000a. 47. I thank my colleague Marc Bregman of the Hebrew Union College for clarifying that this passage reflects the school of Moshe haDarshan, who lived in southern France during the eleventh century, two generations before Rashi. Personal communication, January 12, 1998. 48. The text of the 1007 Anonymous is in Habermann, 1945a, p. 19. For the usual dating of the work to the eleventh century, see Chazan, 1970–71. Kenneth Stow, 1984, has argued for a much later dating, no earlier than the thirteenth century. For the First Crusade text, see Solomon bar Samson’s chronicle, in Habermann, 1945a, p. 25 ⳱ Neubauer and Stern, p. 1. 49. Ibid., Habermann, p. 30 ⳱ Neubauer and Stern, p. 6. 50. “Amarrer bevekhi,” in Bernfeld, 1:252. 51. “Elohim be’alunu,” in Habermann, 1945a, p. 154, and compare the use of A aខhazu be-ma’asei avoteihem in the Sefer Hasidim, Parma (SHP), par.15. 52. Gershom bar Isaac, “Ish levush ha-badim,” in Goldschmidt and Fraenkel, A 1:137–42, v. 42; Sefer Hasidim, Parma (SHP), par. 15. Lamentably, the Bar Ilan data base does not include poetry. 53. Midrash Tanhuma, ខ par. Vayishlaខh, s. 9 (beginning “vayavo’ ”). 54. See for instance the wonderful Hebrew exemplum featuring an errant wife who merits a fiery throne in a room of flame in the afterlife; Yassif, 1994, pp. 387–88. On the origins of the Christian concept of hell as a place of fire, see Peter Brown, 2000. 55. See (for the early modern period) Eire, 1995. 56. B. Avodah Zara 18. The Hebrew text is also in Bernfeld, 1:103. 57. Lam. Rabbah 2:2, 3:39. This English translation is from the edition by Rabbinowitz, 1983, p. 161. See also Gittin 57b-58a. 58. “Elohim be-ozneinu shama’nu,” Habermann, 1945a, p. 83. 59. “Ein kamokha be’ilmim,” in Bernfeld, 1:219. See also Petuchowski, pp. 71–84. 60. “Elohim be’alunu,” Habermann, 1945a, p. 154. 61. Yuval; and see also Kanarfogel, 2000, p. 137. 62. Compare Ivan Marcus, 1996. I use the term “key symbols” as defined by Ortner, 1973. See also Tambiah. 63. For the story of Raphael Levy, see the summary of the trial process and a French translation of the Judeo-German account of the incident circulated by the Metz Jews, translated (into French) and discussed by Joseph Reinach. See also the meticulous study of the incident by Patricia Behre, especially chapter 3. Behre is interested in the confessional and political tensions suggested by the tragedy, and not in the curious account of Levy’s torture and execution. 64. The letters were passed to Levy by a young prison maid; see Behre, p. 110. 65. Reinach, p. 83. Translation from the French mine. 66. Ibid., p. 99. Levy’s plea, prior to his execution, for a proper Jewish burial,

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was expressed in a letter confiscated by the authorities, who then argued that the prisoner’s anticipation of conviction argued for his guilt. Levy’s lawyer attempted to thwart this argument by observing that the prisoner had written his request in a state of terror and subsequent to interrogation and torture. See Behre, pp. 115 and 125. 67. Ibid., p. 170. 68. Scholem, p. 153. Scholem’s note reads: “I have found these words also in several manuscripts containing charms against harsh torture” He does not list these sources. 69. de Spina, Liber 3, Consideratio 9, ii. A father might reasonably have given his son his first set of phylacteries, which by the late thirteenth century he would have received at the age of thirteen, when he became bar mitzvah. As Ivan Marcus has noted, the sources are conflicting on this point, but it appears that in the early medieval period, boys younger than thirteen sometimes were permitted to wear tefillin as well. See Marcus, 1996, pp. 121–25. The father’s own phylacteries were presumably buried with him. I do not think de Spina is interested in verisimilitude, but if he did have a distorted account of a “book” passed from father to son, that account could refer to real custom. 70. See Urbach, 1955, p. 386, who cites the discussion. Not surprisingly, the triad of defining obligations constitutes male identity only. 71. See Deneev for the details of the Billettes chapel and cult. 72. Paul D´emann identified the site of the incident as “la rue des Jardins,” currently “[la] rue des Archives.” See D´emann, p. 73. See also Deneev. For the nineteenth-century incident, which involved the conversion to Catholicism of three young Protestant women attending a French boarding school, see Janson. 73. Some scholars have attempted to sift the narrative to this end. Thus, D´emann writes, “Ainsi pour le miracle des Billettes, le fait du proc`es et du chˆatiment du juif Jonathas, brˆul´e vif, est bien e´ tabli, de mˆeme que l’existence d’un culte liturgique local pendant plusieurs si`ecles; mais pour la profanation et le miracle, on n’a que les aveux arrach´es par la torture et le t´emoignage d’une voisine dont on ne sait strictement rien,” p. 76. The author notes with horror the “discovery” of a manuscript dated 1291 and purporting to represent the bill of sale of Jonathan’s house (!), p. 77. 74. See, e.g., Kopytoff; Gosden; and Marshall. I am also grateful to Susan Langdon for making available a draft version of her essay “Inalienable Possessions: Biographies from Early Greece,” which treats the growing bibliography on material culture. 75. See chapter 4 and the discussion toward the end there. The use of ashes in medieval fast-day liturgies for preventing calamities (or to provide closure in their aftermath?) is attested in the Sefer Eshkol of R. Abraham b. Isaac of Narbonne, p. A 51b, and in the Tur, Oraខh Hayyim, p. 579. 76. For the sumptuary restrictions recommended after the Blois incident, see the Troyes letter in Habermann, 1945a, p. 146. It is not clear whether these recommendations, or the accompanying call for an annual commemorative fast, were observed. See David Wachtel; and my discussion in chapter 2. A hint of the sanctity that surrounded the graves of Jewish martyrs is found in Ephraim of Bonn’s account of the martyrdom at Neuss (1196). After the survivors persuaded

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(bribed) the bishop to permit them to remove the male victims impaled on wheels, “they took them down by boat to the city of Xantes and buried them with the zខ addiqim who had been buried there in 1096.” Habermann, 1945a, p. 131. See also Horovitz, pp. 17–27. Carlos Eire mentions the Christian perception, persisting into early modern Spain, that Jews (or conversos) continued to visit Jewish cemeteries for religious rituals; see Eire, 1995, pp. 92–93. This was one reason Spanish cemeteries were eventually moved indoors; personal communication, Carlos Eire, March 8, 2000. 77. On the knives used to kill martyrs or used by the martyrs themselves to A commit suicide, see the Sefer Hasidim, Bologna (SHB), par. 113 (the passage does not appear in the Parma edition); this passage also mentions bloodied clothing, as do pars. 372 and 834. Yedidiah b. Israel of Nirenberg, a student of R. Yehiel of Paris, mentions his teacher’s ruling that martyrs must be buried in their bloody clothing; see David, p. 251 and nn. 2, 3. David cites a manuscipt of the A arefat of Mordecai of Qovetz liqqutei dinim uminhagim miខhakhmei-Ashkenaz veZ Modena. See also the comments of David Qimhi ខ (“Radaq”) and Joseph Qara’ on Isa. 14:19. 78. Yuval. I refer to the use of ritual drops of wine during the Passover seder. 79. Abraham Gross. Note also the change, about the same time, in the custom of displaying the bridal sheet; see Langer. 80. Yuval. 81. The image finds (sentimental) expression in the early twentieth-century historical novel of Sholom Asch, which describes the Chmielnitzki massacres of 1648. In an early scene portraying the dedication of a new synagogue, a new Torah scroll is placed in the ark with one saved from a pogrom in Ashkenaz: “The new scroll has as yet no covering stained with the blood of martyrs and with the tears of fugitives. Its covering is still new and unstained.” I cite from the English translation, Kiddush haShem: An Epic of 1648, p. 34. The commemorative laments for the victims of Chmielnitzki written in the seventeenth century do not make use of this imagery. See the rich collection of poems, chronicles, gravestone epitaphs, and letters, collected by Jonas Gurland and published 1887–92. 82. Ortner, 1973; Tambiah. 83. Lavin, pp. 1–24. Rubin, 1992. 84. Lavin, p. 2. 85. Sirat, 1992.

EPILOGUE In this year [1306], during August and September, all the Jews, except perhaps for a few who wished to be baptized, were expelled from the kingdom of France. And the king had their goods collected by his servants and took possession of them, except for a portion of money given to each Jew for completing the journey out of the kingdom. Many of them died along the way from exhaustion and distress. —John of Paris, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 21:647.

I

N THE LATE summer of 1306, Philip IV expelled the Jews of royal France. Perhaps 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children—arguably the same number banished in the Spanish expulsion of 1492—were ordered to depart the royal realm “on pain of death.”1 The numbers who chose baptism over exile were negligible, a final testimony to Philip’s failure to convert his Jews.2 The last chapter of their stay in France, however, was harrowing—a mass captio, which left an already stricken French Jewry penniless, and the trauma of flight to less than hospitable neighboring lands. With that flight, we may conclude our literary journey; the martyr continued to figure in Hebrew writing from Christian lands, but for the next few centuries, he would play no role in France. Nonetheless, he had played a role for French Jews, and a successful one, if the preference for exile over conversion is any marker of the conviction martyrocentric ideals had wrought. Certainly the mass conversions on the eve of the Spanish expulsion, where martyrological literature and ideals did not flourish as they did in France, are a provocative contrast. Did martyrological poems like those studied here shape Jewish resistance to conversion? The preceding chapters suggest that the Jewish poetry of martyrdom at least contributed to the resistance of northern French Jews to conversionary efforts. Moreover, its distinctive literary features owe much to the structure of northern French Jewish society and to the prestige and influence of the Tosafist elite. The incidents and poetry analyzed in this book followed a chronological trajectory beginning with the first judicial prosecution of French Jews (Blois, 1171) and stopping with the first recorded accusation of Jewish desecration of the host (Paris, 1290), a period spanning a little more than

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a century. Because of the turbulent history embraced by that century, it is difficult to trace a literary or cultural history in a smooth and continuous line. Accordingly, I have concentrated on isolated incidents, reconstructing them against what we know about the historical background of the period, as well as what we know about the larger society in which Jews existed, and even flourished for a time. Against that background, for instance, we can assert something about the evolving figure of the martyr in Hebrew commemorative poetry. The Blois poems introduce the confident figure of the martyr as a member of the scholar elite; this in itself marks a significant diversion from the range of martyr types in the laments for the victims of the First and Second Crusades. The new conventions signaled by the Blois laments take root quickly, as evidenced by their use in the laments for the Jews of York who died in 1190. Over the next century, the martyrological ideal continued to evolve. The later laments often feature martyrological vignettes, affective in tone and attentive to details of pathos and suffering. The vignettes of this later poetry embrace a wider demographic range, although the scholar-rabbi and other local authorities are still privileged in martyrological representations. The suggestion of a trend is strengthened by a parallel development in Christian hagiographical ideals over this period. As Vauchez and others have shown, medieval writing about (Christian) saints tended to “posit a synonymy between spiritual merit and social distinction.” Throughout the twelfth century sainthood “was almost exclusively reserved to personages of episcopal or aristocratic status.” In the thirteenth century, however, the laity also found a place among the sanctified.3 The polemical features of the Hebrew poems project a picture of mingled fury and desperation that sharpens and redirects its focus over the thirteenth century. I have suggested that this feature of the poetry responds to the rates of attrition among Jewish communities to conversion, which peaks in the middle decades of the thirteenth century and then wanes. The crude vulgarity of some of the polemical segments complements the sophisticated reinforcement of scholarly authority in ways that might appeal especially to privileged and intelligent young men. These young men were in fact a segment of Jewish society that seems to have been particularly vulnerable to conversion. Certainly, fervent and educated young converts were able to cause great damage upon defection. The lament of young Meir of Rothenburg for the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 gives us some idea how deeply immersed in the cultural tastes of the times the Tosafists’ disciples were. The polemical features of this remarkable poem represent a response to Marianism as well as debates internal to the learned Jewish community. Yet, by the latter half of the century, the laments for Samson of Metz (1276) and for the thirteen

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martyrs of Troyes (1288) suggest a less exclusive martyrological ideal, coinciding with the decreased authority of the Tosafists and the increased disarray characterizing northern French Jewish life.4 Also paralleling this trend is the noteworthy shift from a depiction of the burning martyrs in the language of covenantal renewal to an emphasis on martyrdom as a gesture of personal faith, a representation of individual rather than collective transfiguration. In keeping with this shift, there is evidence in the later period of an increasing interest in mystical imagery, sometimes visible in a preference for imagery taken from the biblical book of Ezekiel over images of Sinai. In other cases, such as that of Solomon Simhah ខ of Troyes, the poet himself is known to be associated with esoteric beliefs. The story of Jonathan the Jew gives us some indication also of the prevalence of mystical (or outright magical) attitudes among northern French Jews at the end of the thirteenth century. The Old French lament for the Troyes martyrs makes clear how sensitive the poets were to questions of audience and convention. In this case, the verses discussed in this book showed signs of their authors’ awareness of the cultural tastes and trends around them, in which their audiences shared. These stylistic conventions went beyond a taste for aristocratic heroes to include a new interest in historical detail and dialogue and affective renderings of the martyrs’ loyalty to their families and God. Likewise, the martyrs’ concern for honor and revenge reflect courtly investment in these contemporary attributes. The pathetic images of the victims’ suffering and death have an analogue in vernacular Old French writing from the twelfth through thirteenth century, attested from the chivalric romances of Chr´etien de Troyes to hagiographic romances such as Amis et Amile or the Vie de Saint Alexis.5 On the other hand, the increasing popularity of female saints among Christian audiences, which accompanies their literary debut in the literature of secular romance, is not obviously a feature of the Hebrew poetry. As I have shown elsewhere, the depiction of women martyrs in the later poetry, albeit scanty, nonetheless suggests conformity to the increased misogynism of thirteenth-century vernacular texts.6 The incidents and laments discussed in this book emerged in a French-speaking context, and there is a need for a similar study of Hebrew martyrological poetry from the German-speaking lands that can take into account the impact of vernacular literature and trends there. As noted in the introduction, one vernacular trend resisted by the Jewish martyrological writers was the increasing preference for vernacular authors of secular and hagiographical romance to work in prose. This doubtless says something about the divergent settings for which Hebrew and vernacular prose were produced and in which they were “practiced.”

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However, even if the difference could be precisely articulated—which it cannot—I do not think it would provide a satisfactory explanation for the divergence of Hebrew and vernacular literature on this point. To some extent, the resistance to Hebrew prose was also ideological. The legal literature, the homiletical and ethical literature, all illustrate that medieval Jews in northern Europe were perfectly capable of writing prose, at times even in a lively and engaging style. It may be that, as in Islamic lands, narrative tales of Jewish heroism and piety circulated in the vernacular.7 But when it came to martyrdom, poetry, particularly liturgical poetry, was the preferred medium.8 The rabbis controlled the performance of martyrological poems, and the music, colors, gestures, and settings in which they appeared. At the same time, they inserted individual laments into a liturgical calendar while providing sanctioned frameworks for meditation on faith and doubt, suffering and election. Indeed, these frameworks frequently took the form of penitential liturgies. Thus constrained, even expressions of disbelief, confusion, and doubt remained securely anchored to contexts that ratified religious authority. As the enduring belief in the martyr’s immunity to flame demonstrates, official expressions of doctrine sometimes “trickled down” in colorful ways. But overall, the rabbi-poets’ exploitation of martyrocentric motifs and beliefs as a means of interpreting humiliation, persecution, and violence, seems to have worked—if by “worked” we take the simple marker of conversion trends. True, these trends show an increase in conversion through the period considered the height of Tosafist authority. However, the deep saturation of martyrological imagery and conventions in northern European Jewish literature and popular beliefs stanched a “hemorrhage” that might otherwise have been a flood.9 Instances of mass conversion, such as those seen in Muslim and Christian Spain, or in southern Italy, were unknown in northern France. And by the mid–thirteenth century, mass conversion of the Jews was a goal largely shared by the monarchs of northern Europe, perhaps especially Louis IX, as well as by the Church. For these men, who designed and implemented the policies designed to crush the Jews into submission, a conversion rate of 5 to 10 percent was a dismal achievement. The fact remains that even on the brink of expulsion, Philip IV could not convince his Jews to convert. As one poet who lived through the expulsion of 1306 bitterly commented: My foe has terrified Your people and brought down his remnant and pride. [But] he will not join the house of Esau, his destroyers and inciters. Rather, Israel will rejoice in his Maker, for You will save a wretched people.10

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The poet, Reuven bar Isaac, draws here on an old Jewish topos identifying Christianity with the descendants of Esau. In the same poem, he alludes to the devastating captio of the summer of 1306, which stripped French Jewry of its possessions and wealth, and of the failure of destitution and exile to result in their conversion. As I have emphasized throughout this book, an important difference between Christian and Jewish martyrology goes hand in hand with their similarities. The heroic martyrs of Christian texts featured real and fictional saints from the ancient past. The medieval Hebrew literature of martyrology (prose as well as poetry) commemorated the steadfast resistance and deaths of real, contemporary men and women. In this context, Brigitte Cazelle’s comment that the martyrs of the texts “were not so much models to be imitated as they were exceptions to be admired” must be strongly qualified with respect to the Hebrew genre.11 Martyrdom, I have claimed, was a problematic solution to the physical, intellectual and spiritual crises generated by persecution. The idealized figure of the martyr embodied attributes that offered Jews a way to live as Jews under pressure—until the moment when dying as a Jew remained the only option. The evidence scattered through Christian chronicles, trial documents, and fiscal records makes clear how deeply the ideal of martyrdom as a destiny of last resort was shared by all sorts of Jews—elite and common, male and female, young and old. If I have argued here that the weakest link in the chain of resistance was among the intellectual elite, I have also claimed that this elite crafted and upheld the martyrological ideal. The conclusion that “simple faith” was invariably superior to educated belief is not however axiomatic. “Simple faith” inspired acts of brutal ignorance and bigotry reflected in violence against the Jews as much as the occasional act of humane generosity toward Jewish individuals and communities recorded in the Jewish prose chronicles. And “simple faith” gave rise to harsh prejudices within Jewish communities as much as it fueled stalwart resistance among Jewish men and women whose exposure to Tosafist dialectics was nonexistent. I mean to make no categorical judgments: Both learned and simple alike endured and redeemed a history of great violence in the way they met the stake. It is the nature of history, however, that it is rarely preserved in the words of simple men, and it was the poets of martyrdom who took responsibility for ensuring that the martyr transcended the flames. The poems of martyrdom discussed in this book emerge on the boundary line between two competing notions of group identity. It is in this sense that they are not merely commemorative poems for the dead but exquisitely concerned with shaping the identities of the living. And for the living, the heroic martyr embodied and transcended the contradictions of life conducted increasingly in the shadow of the stake. It

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should be remembered that sometimes that shadow was long. The topos of the bele qedushah, the “beautiful martyrdom” of the ideal, had meaning only to men and women who by definition had lived in two worlds long enough that their implacable resistance to one of them inevitably found expression in the language of both. This is a cultural conundrum, perhaps, and yet one hardly unique to medieval Jews. Yet the case of the medieval Jews holds special interest because of the way it illuminates the transformation of medieval secular and ecclesiastical institutions, the way it illustrates the interplay of minority and majority identities and conflicts in the process of that transformation, and the way it marks the place of literature in defining the distinctive character of a minority under ceaseless, often brutal, attack. Western historians have largely ignored the people and phenomenon treated by this book, perhaps confirming the medieval Christian sense that neither the victims nor authors discussed here were as “French” as their Christian neighbors. Similarly, Jewish historians have too often distorted the lachrymose features of the medieval Jewish experience in northern Europe, downplaying the evidence the literature offers for a rich and synthetic expression of identity emerging from a Jewish community that lived not only with persecution but with cultural renascence.12 As recent scholarship testifies, these rigid assumptions are finally tumbling down. I hope these studies contribute a piece to the richer picture we can together seek to rebuild. Given the nature of these studies, it only makes sense to conclude with a poem, and the late Dan Pagis—a gifted poet and medievalist, as well as a young survivor of Nazi Europe—has left me my concluding words. Pagis’s poem, “To Tempt the Devil” (“Peh le-satan”), hauntingly echoes Ephraim of Bonn’s twelfth-century lament for the Blois martyrs. Pagis liked puzzles, and I suspect he was content with a medieval allusion whose source few devotees of modern Hebrew poetry would recognize. As poetry, this short, elegant piece also gestures to what I could call the “meaning” of the Hebrew poetry of martyrdom in a way scholarship cannot manage to do. Always delicately ironic, Pagis wrote: When he stood before the guillotine, Danton said: “The verb to guillotine (this new verb) is limited in declension by person and tense, for I am unable to say in the past tense: I was guillotined.” A sharply cutting sentence, but naive. Behold, I (and truly I am not unique) have been beheaded

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I have been hanged I have been burned I have been shot I have been slaughtered. I have been forgotten. (Why do I tempt the devil: He still might recall that ethically speaking, at least for now—I have triumphed.)13 And so, the medieval poets might respond, did we.

NOTES 1. For the 1306 expulsion, see Jordan, 1989, pp. 204, 215; Blumenkranz; Chazan, 1973a, pp. 193–96. The exact date of the expulsion order is not clear, but it seems to have been underway in July to August 1306. In addition to the description found in John of Paris, references to the expulsion may be found in the RHGF 21:716 and 22:19. The original Latin of the epigraph beginning this chapter is as follows: “Hoc etiam anno, in Augusto et Septembri, omnes Judaei, nisi tarte pauci qui baptizari voluerent, de regno Franciae sunt expulsi; eorumque bona rex habuit et fecit colligi per ministras, nisi quod cuilibet Judaeo data est portio aliqua pecuniae pro via extra regnum complenda, quorum multi in itinere mortui sunt prae lassitudine vel dolore.” For a range of estimates on the size of the Spanish expulsion of 1492, see Gitlitz, p. 74; Gitlitz settles on a figure between 100,000 and 160,000. 2. Jordan, 1989, p. 215. 3. Vauchez, 1997, pp. 257 and 265ff. See also Vauchez, 1991. The citation is from Brigitte Cazelle’s introduction to the volume; see Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, pp. 2–3. 4. Robert Chazan has written of a movement toward “centralization” of Jewish self-government in the thirteenth century, in tandem with greater centralization in the administration of Philip IV. However, as he notes, the sources are scant, and those Jews who can be identified as men of wealth and power represent a new class of leader unrelated to the Tosafist elite, who combined religious with political authority and personal wealth. See Chazan, 1973a; p. 187. I am less convinced of the evidence for centralization and “secularization” than Chazan is, and more struck by the discontinuity of institutional authority. 5. See Rosenberg and Danon; and Crane. See also the bibliography cited in my chapter 5, n. 41. 6. Einbinder, 2000a. 7. A lively hagiographical literature certainly circulated in Hebrew in northern Europe, and there is no reason why it should not have had a vernacular analogue. The tales preserved by Nissim bar Jacob of Cairouan are often cited in this conA text; see Nissim’s Hibbur Yafeh min ha-yeshu’ah; or the Shalshelet haQabbalah of

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Gedaliah ibn Yehiyyah. ខ For a general study of the phenomenon, see Yassif; Dan, 1974 and 1981; and Isaiah Berger. 8. This point was made long ago by Yerushalmi, 1982. 9. For the use of the term “hemorrhage” to describe Jewish conversion in the midcentury, see Stacey, 1992. The term was borrowed by Shatzmiller, 1995; see also my discussion in chapter 1. 10. Reuben bar Isaac, “Adonai rahum ខ ve-hanun,” ខ in the Seder Tamid, p. 89a. 11. Cazelles, in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, p. 2. 12. See the interesting study by Myers. 13. Pagis, “Peh le-satan,” in Pagis, 1987, p. 9.

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INDEX

Abba Shalom, 88, 99n.124 “Abi’ah miqreh” (I will tell a tale), 152n.50 Abihu, biblical tale of, 51, 55, 58, 67n.40 Abner of Burgos, 91n.14 Abot derabbi Natan, 167 Abraham b. Azriel, 87 Abraham bar Samuel, 52 Abraham ben Maimon, 87, 97n.114, 98nn.116,118 Abraham Ibn Ezra, 7, 66n.21, 82 Accorre, Renier, 129 acrostics: in Samsom of Metz lament, 107; in Troyes laments, 132, 140, 143, 150n.30 Adam of Chambly (Bishop of Senlis), 74 adolescent Jews, conversion patterns among, 25–26, 37, 41n.24, 72, 113– 115, 181–182 “Adonai eleikha ’einai yesabberu” (O Lord, My Eyes Look to You), 63 African-American fiction, martyr imagery in, 41n.18 Agus, Irving, 90n.1 “Ahbirah ខ milin” (I Will Compose Words), 152n.51 Akiba, 20–21, 167 Alix, Countess, 47, 65n.8 “Allelei li ki va’u” (Woe is Me, For They Have Come), 30 Amis et Amile, 182 Amnon of Mainz, 69n.57, 71, 123n.59 amulets, 160–61 Andalusian Hebrew poetry, 6–7. See also Sephardic poetry. Blois laments influenced by, 51, 57–58, 66n.21; martyrological laments and influence of, 82; nineteenth-century scholars’ assessment of, 7–8, 15n.18, 22; Samson of Metz lament and influence of, 107; Troyes martyr laments and, 132 Andreas (convert), 26 Anjou: expulsions in, 115; martyrs in, 73, 92n.19, 96n.111, 152n.50 Arugat haBosem, 87 Asch, Sholom, 179n.81

Ashkenaz: book burnings and, 89; courtly motif in literature of, 18; cultural influences on poetry of, 107–8, 120n.37, 133; early settlements of, 2–4; French Jewish communities and, 49; halakhah interpretations of, 120n.37; liturgies of, 147–148, 159–60; Maimunist controversy and, 86; musical tradition for laments of, 118n.5; poetry of, 6–9, 22, 66n.21; rituals of, 171; Torah commentaries of, 165–66 Avodah Zara 18, 167 “Ayumatkha kevulah ba-golah” (Your Awesome One Is Bound in Exile), 36 Babylonian Talmud, 165, 167 bailli of Troyes, 129–30, 138–39, 149n.19, 152n.52 baraita, 153n.66 Banitt, M., 133 baptism, in martyrological literature, 34– 35, 112–16 Baron, Salo, 11, 15n.8 Baruch of Mainz, 52, 62–64, 152n.51, 164 Baruch the Jew, 35, 122n.53 Behre, Patricia, 177n.63 bele qedushah, 11, 14, 185 Benedict of York, 35, 123n.61 Benjamin the Scribe, 32–34, 43n.55, 101– 17, 124–25 Benton, John, 129 Berger, David, 49, 67n.31 Bernfeld, 143 biblical references, in martyr laments, 108– 10, 131–32, 134–36, 147–48, 150n.27, 165–66. See also specific biblical books, e.g., Ezekiel, Book of, Sinai motif; wheel imagery, 32 Billettes chapel, 170 Blanche of Castile, 74 Blois martyrs: biblical motif in laments of, 109–10; bookburning in laments of, 164–66; commemorative rituals concerning, 171, 178n.76; fireproof motif in laments of, 45–64, 111, 155–56, 161–

212 Blois martyrs (cont.) 62, 175n.32; laments of 1171, 12, 18, 27–31, 37, 39, 130, 133, 146, 152n.51, 180–81; literary tradition of, 8; ransom of books by, 163–64 blood libel, 3, 39 bodily dismemberment: Simon of Metz lament, 110–17; in Troyes laments, 144– 48 boiling, execution by, 152n.50 book burning: by Jews, 73, 92n.21; Jonathan narrative and, 156–73, 173nn.5,7, 174n.14; in martyrological poetry, 4–5, 12–14, 31, 70–90 Book of Knowledge, 84–85 Boppard, Jewish martyrs of, 30 Bregman, Marc, 177n.47 Brown, Peter, 50 Brundage, James, 122n.50 burning imagery, 23. See also fireproof martyr imagery Bynum, Caroline, 144, 153n.62 captio ransom, 45, 48, 127, 180, 184 Cazelle, Brigitte, 184 Center for Advanced Jewish Study at the University of Pennsylvania, 15n.20 Champagne, Jewish communities in, 128– 129, 139 Champenois dialect, 151n.39 chanson de geste cycles, Hebrew prose compared with, 5–6 Chanson de Roland, 5, 39, 139 Charlemagne, invitation to Jews by, 2, 14n.2 Chatelain family, 127, 132–33, 135–42, 149n.7, 151n.43 Chazan, Robert, 186n.4 child marriages, resistance to conversion and, 25 children, as martyrs, 39, 45–46, 137, 151n.47 Chmielnitzki massacre, 57, 171n.81 Chr´etien of Troyes, 182 Christiani, Pablo, 91n.14 Christianity: epithets against, in martyrological poetry, 23, 41n.16; fireproof imagery of, 54–55, 67n.34–35; hagiographic and martyrological literature of, 4–5, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 53, 56, 59, 68n.51, 133, 181–84; host libels used

INDEX

by, 155–73; Jewish-Christian dialogues, in martryological poems, 26–27; Jewish conversion to, 3–4, 19–39, 62–64, 71– 73, 91n.11, 112–16, 130–48, 180–86; Jewish unity in face of, 21, 62–64; New World missionaries and, 90n.7; oathtaking and, 112, 122n.50 Clark, Stuart, 122n.55, 174n.11 Clement IV (Pope), 103–104 Cohen, Gerson, 5, 65n.3 Cohen, Jeremy, 24 Cohen, Jonathan, 65n.7 Cohen, Mark, 15n.8 collective witness, as motif in Blois laments, 27–29 Cologne, martyrs of, 32 communal sacrifice, as lament motif, 20– 21, 26–27, 108–09, 182 conversion: as alternative to martyrdom, 3– 4; expulsion as alternative to, 180–86; of Jewish elites, 71–73, 90n.7, 91nn.11, 14, 114–16, 122n.56; male-female rates of, 25–26, 41n.24, 42n.30; of Metz Jews, 112–13, 122n.53; resistance to, in martyr laments, 17–39, 114–15, 130– 48, 150n.21, 181–86; royal subsidies for, 91n.16; in Troyes laments, 138–39 Croxton mystery play, 171–72 crusade lyric (sirventes), 79 Crusades. See also specific crusades, e.g., Second Crusade; attacks on Jews during, 1–3 cultic imagery, in martyrological poetry, 31, 108–9 cultural renaissance, Jewish participation in, 3–5, 18, 49 cultural symbols, laments in context of, 11, 102–3, 113–14, 118n.6, 122n.55 Daniel, Book of, fireproof imagery inspired by, 13–14, 51, 55–56, 59, 67n.38, 111 DaPiera, Meshullam, 87–89, 98n.121 Darmesteter, Ars`ene, 8, 128–132, 134, 138, 140, 143, 151n.39–40, 151n.43 David bar Meshullam, 109 David bar Saul, 84 David ben Samson, 73 David de Dinant, 92n.21 Dehullu, Joanie, 173n.1 D´emann, Paul, 178nn.72–73 desecration narrative, 170–73, 178n.72

INDEX

de Spina, Alphonsus, 157–59, 170, 178n.69 Deuteronomy, Book of: Blois martyrs and passages from, 47, 60–61, 68n.53; phylacteries with passages from, 161; Samson of Metz lament and, 120n.27 Dobson, Barrie, 38, 41n.24 Dominicans, in martyr laments, 44n.69, 112, 126–27, 132, 139, 152nn51,53 Doniach, Nakdimon, 103–4, 119nn.12,19, 120nn.21,23,27 Donin, Nicholas, 26, 72, 74, 91n.14 Ecclesiastes, Book of, Samson of Metz lament and, 119n.16 Edward I, expulsion of Jews by, 38 Eire, Carlos, 179n.76 Eleazar of Worms, 2, 60 “Eleh Ezqerah,” 167 “El erekh apayyim” (O Long-Suffering God), 143, 145–48 Elhanan, 71 Eliezer derabbi Nathan, 168 elite groups, conversion efforts among, 62– 64, 184–86 emigration laws, persecution of Jews and, 75, 93n.37 “Emunei shelumei ysrael” (O Faithful, Peacable Ones of Israel), 51, 143 England: conversion of Jews in, 37–38; expulsion of Jews in, 3, 9, 40n.7, 44n.84, 51, 115, 130, 172; Tosafist schools in, 29 Enlightenment philosophy, martyrological literature in context of, 103 Ephraim of Bonn: Blois martyrs described by, 31, 45, 48, 50, 52–55, 63–64, 67nn.30,32, 69n.57, 146, 185; “Eleh Ezqerah” written by, 167; on forced conversions, 123n.56; Neuss martyrdom described by, 178n.76; ritual in laments and, 102; Wurzburg martyrs described by, 164 Ephraim of Regensburg, 36, 82, 107 Erfurt, anti-Jewish violence in, 73 “Eyn lanu elohim ’od zulatekha” (We Have No God Beside You), 40n.6 “Esa bekhi unehi” (I Wail and Moan), 40n.6 Eudes of Chateauroux, 74

213 Exodus, Book of: fire imagery in, 32; phylacteries with passages from, 161; Samson of Metz lament and, 120n.27; Troyes laments and, 137–38 “Ez’aq hamas” ខ (I Cry Out over the Violence), 131, 140–48 Ezekiel, Book of: Blois laments and, 60, 68n.52; female sexuality in, 121n.43; mystical imagery in, 182; Samson of Metz lament and, 109–10, 119n.19, 120n.23; wheel imagery in book of, 32–33 Ezra of Moncontour, 74 fasting, commemoration of martyrs with, 56–57, 68n.45, 134, 171, 178nn.75–76 feminine ideal: in martyrological poetry, 10–11, 39, 44n.83, 75–79; in medieval poetry, 5 fire incantations, 160–63, 171, 175n.23, 178n.75 fireproof martyr imagery: in Blois laments, 28–31, 42n.46, 45–64, 162, 175n.33; Christian belief in, 54–55, 67nn.34–36, 175n.32; enduring belief in, 183–86; Jonathan narrative and, 155–73; in Troyes poetry, 13–14 First Crusade: attacks on Rhenish Jews during, 17, 49; book burning in laments of, 163; Hebrew chronicles of, 5; martyrological poetry of, 26–27, 82, 102, 108–9, 118n.3, 121n.45, 133, 145, 168, 181; prose chronicles of, 67n.36 flapping arms, significance of, in laments, 110, 121n.47 Fortalitium Fidei, 156–157 Foulquois, Guy, 26 Fournier, Jacques (Bishop), 89 Foxe’s Book of Marytrs, 68n.51, 121n.47 Fraenkel, Abraham, 22, 40n.9, 143 France, Jewish communities in, 4, 71, 90n.6. See also specific communities, e.g., Blois, Troyes; attacks on, 2–3; books as symbol in, 170–73; centralization of self-government in, 186n.4; conversion patterns in, 18–39, 115; cultural influences on poetry in, 107–108, 120n.37; expulsions of, 115, 130, 180– 86, 186n.1; halakhah interpretations of, 120n.37; lost musical traditions of,

214 France (cont.) 118n.5; Maimunist controversy and, 86; martyrological laments in, 6–9, 11–12, 22, 73, 95n.71, 100–17; mystical practices of, 170; Philip IV’s unification efforts, 21, 128–29; rabbinical schools in, 2–3; Torah commentaries in, 166 Franciscans, in martyr laments, 44n.69, 126–17, 132, 152n.51 Frankfurt, martyrs of, 21, 40n.6, 44n.83, 73, 112–13 Franzesi banking firm, 129 Freudenthal, Gad, 153n.69 Fulda, martyrs of, 32, 73 Gascony, expulsions from, 115 “Ge’al lekha atah ge’ulati” (Redeem Me Yourself), 51–52, 59–62 Geertz, Clifford, 9, 16n.25, 118n.4 Genesis, Book of, 135–36 Geoffrey of Bellevelle, 74 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 95n.72 Germany: conversion rates for Jews in, 38– 39, 115; Jewish communities in, 2–3, 9; martyrological laments in, 73; medieval Jewish communities in, 9, 79–80, 90n.5; Tosafist schools in, 29 Gerondi, Jonah, 84 Gershom bar Isaac, 28–29, 42n.46, 51– 52, 59–64, 166 Goldschmidt, Daniel, 22, 40n.9, 143 Gorni, Isaac, 144–45 Gornici, Geoffrey, 129 Graetz, martyrs of, 19 Greatrex, Joan, 38 Gregory IX (Pope), 73–74 Grossman, Abraham, 24 Guibert of Nogent, 53, 67n.31 Guide to the Perplexed, 84–85, 87–88 Guidi, Albizzo (Biche), and Musciatto (Mouche), 129 Hadrian (Emperor), Jewish persecutions by, 4, 22, 83, 167 A Hagigah, 60 Halperin, David, 121n.43 A Hananiah b. Teradion, 31, 83, 158, 167– 68, 170 A Hayyim ben Makir, 152n.51 A Hayyim of Chaource, 68n.51, 137–39 Head, Tom, 16n.25

INDEX

hell, Torah commentaries on, 166, 177n.54 Henry III (Count), 129 Henry of Champagne, 46–47 Henry VI, 30 Herman the Jew, 26, 91n.14, 114, 122n.56 Hillel of Bonn, 21, 28, 31, 51, 55–57, 62–64, 143 Hillel of Verona, 85, 97n.114, 147 historical events: documentation of Troyes martyr laments, 117–18; martyrological literature in context of, 5, 8–10, 100–3 host desecration libel, 13–14, 38, 96n.101, 118n.3, 180; Jonathan narrative and, 155–57, 170–73, 173n.1 hymn singing, at executions, 111, 117, 121n.49 A Ibn Hisdai brothers, 86–87, 97n.114 idolatry, Jewish abhorrence of, 17 Isaac Aboab, 64, 176n.37 Isaac bar Nathan, 32 Isaac bar Shalom, 35–36, 40n.4, 43n.64, 168 Isaac ben Elyaqim, 164 Isaac haCohen, 132, 140 Isaac of Dampi`ere (Ri), 71, 151n.34, 166 Isaac of Parnas, 123n.59 Isaac Or Zarua’ (Rabbi), 73, 92n.24 Isaac the Parnas, 41n.15 Isaiah, Book of: Samson of Metz lament and, 108, 111, 119n.14, 120n.23; wheel imagery in, 33 “Ish levush ha-badim” (The Man Clothed in Linen), 28–29, 51–52, 59–62 Italian bankers, 129 Italian Hebrew poetry, 120n.35 Jacob b. Meir. See Rabbenu Tam Jacob bar Judah of Lorraine, 8, 11, 39, 126, 130–48, 151n.40 Jacob of Troyes. See Rabbenu Tam Jeanne D’Arc, 54–55, 175n.32 Jeremiah, Book of, 80; Samson of Metz lament and, 111–12, 119n.14; Troyes laments and, 137 Jewish scholarship tradition, translation in context of, 103–4, 119n.9 Joachim of Brandenberg, 176n.42 Job, Book of, 108

INDEX

Joel, Book of, 58 Joel bar Isaac HaLevi, 32 John of Paris, 186n.1 John the Scot, 92n.21 John XXII (Pope), 89 Jonah, Book of, 119n.16 Jonathan the Jew, magic book narrative of, 155–173, 182 Jordan, William C., 25, 38, 41n.24, 91n.16, 104, 115, 119n.9, 141, 152n.52, 159 Joseph bar Asher, 29–30 Joseph bar Isaac (Bekhor Shor) of Orl´eans, 30, 52, 63–64, 69n.58–59 Joseph of Chartres, 165–166, 168 Joseph of Cologne, 166 Joseph Official (haMeqanne’), 91n.16 Josephus, 4, 15n.8 Judah bar Moses HaKohen, 40n.6 Judah bar Qalonymos, 36, 44n.68 Judah ben Solomon haCohen, 70, 90n.2 Judah haCohen, 73–74 Judah Halevi, 73 Judah heHasid, 52 Judah ibn Shabbetai, 88–89 Judah the Pious, 123n.61 Judges, Book of, 134, 142–43 judicial violence: Blois martyrs and, 29–30; martyrological literature and, 18, 108–9; resistance to conversion and, 24–25; Troyes martyr laments and, 127–29 kabbalistic literature, 15n.22 Kallir, Eleazer bar, 7 Kanarfogel, Ephraim, 29, 90n.6, 159–61, 174n.17 Katz, Jacob, 40n.7 Kaufman, Peter, 116, 123n.66 Kings, First Book of, 140–41 Kings, Second Book of, 111 kohanim, fireproof martyrs and, 55 Labb´e chronicle, 156–157 lachrymose historical theory, martyrological literature and, 19 Lamentations, Book of: martyrological poetry and, 76–78, 177n.46; Troyes laments and, 137, 151n.46 Lamentations Rabbah, 167–68 l’Ane, Jean, 129 Langmuir, Gavin, 159, 174n.13

215 La sainte hostie, 156–17 Lauda, martyrs of, 32, 73 Law: as motif in Blois laments, 60–62; Talmud as expression of, 75; in Troyes laments, 146, 153n.66 “Lemi oy lemi avoy” (Who Has Woe, Who Has Sorrow), 63 lepers’ plot (Metz), 100 “Les Myst`eres,” 174n.10 letters: accounts of Blois martyrs in, 45– 47, 49–50, 52–54, 65nn.2,4, 66n.15, 70; Maimunist controversy described by, 84–90, 97n.114; in Raphael Levy case, 169–73 Leviticus, Book of: Blois martyrs and passages from, 47, 55, 58, 60–61, 67n.40; Troyes laments and, 138 Levy, Raphael, 169–73, 177nn.63,66 libel plots. See also specific libels, e.g. blood libel, host desecration libel; Jonathan narrative and, 155–56; in martyrological poetry, 37, 44nn.69,84, 127 Lippold of Brandenburg, 173n.6, 176n.42 liturgical settings: Blois laments read in, 50–51; Jonathan’s magic book narrative and, 158–59; marytrological poems performed in, 102, 118n.4, 133–34, 151n.38; scholarly bias against, 7–9, 15n.20, 40n.7 London Domus, converted Jews in, 38 Louis VII, 46, 48 Louis IX, 4, 74, 128 Luther, Martin, 54 lyric convention, martyrological poetry in context of, 19 Ma’aseh Book, 41n.26, 123n.61 Maccabees, books of, 4 magic book, Jonathan narrative and, 155– 73 maខhzor (festival prayer book), 33–34, 80– 81, 89, 99n.129, 117 Mahzor ខ Vitry, 117, 161 Maimonides, 38, 44n.80, 84–90, 154n.75, 161, 175n.27 Maimunist controversy, 84–90 Maine, expulsions from, 115 Malachi, Book of, 62 male Jews: conversion patterns among, 24– 26, 37, 41n.24, 72, 113–15, 181–82; wheel breaking of, 31

216 Mallarm´e, St´ephane, 163, 176n.36 maqamat, rhymed prose, 5 Marcus, Ivan, 65n.3, 118nn.3,5, 122n.56 Margaret (Queen), 74 martyrdom: Christian view of, 4–5, 9–10, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 53, 56, 59, 68n.51, 122n.55, 133, 181–84; equality of martyrs in, 138, 152n.50; idealization of, 113, 183–86; of Jewish elites, 1–2, 70– 72; personal model of, in Blois laments, 27–29 martyrocentric identity: in Blois laments, 49; rabbi’s exploitation of, 183–86 martyrological laments: aesthetics of poetry and, 6, 9–10; Blois martyrs depicted in, 45, 48–64; characteristics of, 1–2, 6; collections of, 40n.9; courtly language and imagery in, 5; expulsion of French Jews and, 180–86; fireproof motif in, 48–64; historical influences on, 5, 8–13; as historic evidence, 100–103, 126–27; Jewish communities’ preference for, 183–86; Jewish solidarity and cohesion in, 20–39; literary conventions in, 17– 18; medieval Jewish values and, 1–2; Old French versions of, 110–17, 133– 48, 182; origins of, 17; as polemic vehicle, 70–71; published corpus of, 22; rabbinic motifs and traditions in, 4–5; resistance to conversion and, 17–39; Troyes laments, 130–48 medieval Jewish settlements, sources on, 2 Megillat Ahima’atz, 5 Megillat Amrafel, 64, 163, 169 Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg, 4, 104, 176nn.37,39; biblical references in laments, 147; Blois laments and, 12–13, 31, 64; bookburning discussed by, 70– 90, 163, 166, 181; Troyes laments and, 132, 152n.51, 153n.71 Meir ben Eliav, 126, 130–48, 149n.7 Meir ben Elijah of Norwich, 82, 107, 123n.62 Meir ben Simon, 72, 91n.12 Meir of Narbonne, 25–26 Mekhilta, 69n.54 Menahem ខ b. Jacob, 29–30 Metz, martyrs of, 32–33, 100; conversion as alternative, 112; Levy martyrdom, 169–73, 177n.63 mezuzah customs, 175n.27

INDEX

“Mont sont a mechief,” 22, 40n.10 Mordecai bar Eleazer, 83, 176n.41 Mordecai ben Hillel, 71–72 Mordecai of Modena, 179n.77 Morteira, Saul, 64, 176n.37 Moses bar Natan, 73 Moses ben Isaac, 73 Moses of Coucy, 170 Moses of London, 25 Moses haDarshan, 177n.47 music: as accompaniment for laments, 117, 118n.5; during executions, description in laments, 111, 121n.49 mystical practices, 145–46, 153n.64, 159–60, 169–70, 174nn.17, 20, 178n.68 Nadab, biblical tale of, 51, 55, 58, 67n.40 Nahmanides ខ (Moses b. Nahman) ខ (Ramban), 87–88 Nahon, G., 38 Nathan bar Meshullam, 164 Neubauer, Adolphe, 103–104, 119n.12 Neuss, Jewish marytrs at, 31, 178n.76 Nevers, expulsions from, 115 Nissim bar Jacob, 186n.7 Numbers, Book of, 142, 145 oath-taking, in martyr laments, 111–12, 122n.50 1007 Anonymous, 165, 177n.48 ordeal, martyrological literature’s use of, 16n.25 Orl´eans, letter on Blois martyrs from, 45, 47, 50, 52–57, 63–64, 66n.15, 67n.32 Ortner, Sherry, 16n.24, 118n.6, 122n.55 Ovadiah b. Makir, 65n.4 Pagis, Dan, 185–86 Paris: Jewish community in, 45, 115; Jonathan narrative and, 170–73; literary culture in, 8 Pentateuch, 172 Perez b. Elijah of Corbeil, 132 persecution, modern Jewish identity and, 22 peshat exegisis, influence of, 5 Philip III, 128 Philip IV, 21, 126–30, 180, 183–84, 186n.4 phylacteries, 158, 161, 169–70, 172–73

INDEX

Pietism: Jewish martyrological literature and, 18; Jonathan’s magic book narrative and, 158–59; mystical practices of, 145–46, 153n.64, 159–60; Tosafist schools and, 29, 31, 52, 132–33 piyyutim: Blois martyrs depicted in, 48–50, 62; as polemical vehicles, 71–73, 92n.17; Troyes laments as, 143 poetry: aesthetics of Hebrew poetry in Europe, 6–7; changes in violence and nature of, 3; as cultural resistance, 18–39; Maimunist controversy and, 86–90; prose as commentary on, 45–46; research methodology concerning, 13–14 polemical literature: martyr laments as, 70– 71, 102, 181–82; twelfth-century emergence of, 49 polyphony, Jewish laments and, 79 prayer rituals, 102, 116, 123n.66, 161, 169 preaching orders, references in martyrological poetry to, 112, 121n.51, 152n.51 property confiscations, of Troyes martyrs, 127–28, 149n.7 prose literature: baptism and conversion reported in, 34–35, 123n.59; Blois martyrs depicted in, 45–46, 65n.3; genres of, 40n.7; Hebrew prose narratives, 5–6, 15n.13, 22–23, 40n.15; medieval appearance of, 5–6, 15n.13; ritual and belief in, 102 Protestants, 116, 123n.66, 178n.72 Psalms, Book of, 137, 140 Pucellina, 28, 47–48 Qalonymos bar Judah, 20, 42n.33, 83–84, 99n.128, 163 Qalonymos bar Qalonymos, 99n.128 Qalonymos family, 2 qedoshim, 126, 145 qiddush haShem, 133 Qimhi, ខ David (Radaq), 85 Rabbenu Tam, 3, 42n.42, 44n.80, 51, 54, 58, 66n.21, 68n.45, 90n.6, 146; poetry of, 82, 107 rabbinic motifs and traditions, revival of, in marytryological literature, 4 rabbinic scholars: accounts of Blois martyrs by, 46, 49–51, 133; book burning by,

217 88–90; conversion efforts among, 62– 64; dialectical methods of, 70, 90n.2; fragmentation and persecution of, in France, 38, 44n.80, 71, 90n.6; martyrological poetry of, 29, 71 Radaq. See Qimhi, David (Radaq) Ramban. See Nahmanides (Moses b. Nahman) Rashi (Solomon bar Isaac), 2–3, 33, 42n.42, 68nn.40,49; biblical commentaries of, 108, 135–37, 166; on fasting, 56–57; fireproofing of martyrs, comments on, 5, 54; on oath-taking, 111; Samson of Metz lament commentaries, 119nn.14,18–19, 120n.23; school of, 114; Troyes martyrs and, 128, 131, 146 Reinach, Joseph, 177n.63 relapsed Jews, martyrological poetry concerning, 20–21, 41n.24 relics, cult of, 144, 171, 179n.77 religious beliefs, ritual performance of laments and, 102, 118n.4 R´enan, Ernest, 8, 131 Renier de la Belle, 127, 130, 149n.19 responsa, 5, 90n.1, 166 Reuven bar Isaac, 183–84 revenge motif, in martyr laments, 142–43, 171 Rhineland. See Germany Rindfleisch massacres, 21, 82, 108 ritual: Jonathan’s magic book and, 158, 171–73, 178n.76, 179n.77; role of, in martyrological poetry, 102, 118nn.3–5, 122n.55, 147–48 Robert of Torigni, 45 Rubin, Miri, 118n.3, 173nn.1,7 Salfield, Sigmund, 150n.50 Samson of Metz, 13, 21, 100–17, 124– 25, 171, 181–82 Samuel, Second Book of, 143 Samuel bar Abraham haLevi, 40n.6 Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam), 3, 54 Samuel ben Salomon of Falaise, 74, 99n.126, 151n.34 Samuel Ibn Tibbon, 84, 97n.108 Samuel of Evreux, 74 Scribner, Robert, 54 scrolls as Jewish icon, 82–83, 96n.100, 97n.102

218 Second Crusade: martyrological poetry during, 35, 40n.4, 133, 168, 181; violence against Jews during, 2–3, 17–18, 108–9 secular authority. See also judicial violence; in Andalusian Hebrew poetry, 6; Blois martyrs and, 45–46, 49–50; Jewish persecutions and, 28–29 Sefer haMaskil, 131–32, 150n.27 A Sefer Hasidim, 133, 159, 166, 179n.77 Sefer Raziel, 160, 174n.18, 175n.23 Sefer Yosef haMeqanne’, 91n.16, 152n.53 Sefer Yosippon, 5 Sefer Zekhirah (Book of Remembrance), 31, 43n.53; Blois incident in, 45, 54, 63–64 self-sacrifice, as lament motif, 109–10, 182 Sephardic poetry, influence of, on laments, 107–8, 132, 150n.29 “Sha’ali serufah ba-esh” (Ask, O You Who Are Burned in Fire), 72–73, 75–79 “Shahar ខ avi’ todah” (At Dawn I Shall Bring an Offering), 131, 143–48, 162– 63 Shatzmiller, Joseph, 34, 38 “Shemesh veyareah” ខ (O Sun and Moon), 81 shemot, 160–61, 175n.27 Shepherds’ Crusade, 35 Shimmush Tehillim, 160–61, 172, 174n.18 shir ezor poetic style, 66n.21 “Shot ha-sha’arah” (Take Your Stand), 101–17; Hebrew text, 124–25 Sinai motif: in Blois laments, 27–31, 37, 50, 59–62, 64, 68n.51, 110, 146–47; mystical imagery and, 182; in Talmud laments, 84 Solomon b. Abraham, 84–90, 97n.108 Solomon b. Joseph, 152n.50 Solomon bar Isaac. See Rashi Solomon bar Joseph, 73, 81 Solomon bar Samson, 41n.15 Solomon of Dreux, 133, 151n.34 Solomon Simhah ខ the Scribe, 44n.69, 64, 82, 107, 109, 126; “Shahar ខ avi’ todah” lament of, 162–63; Troyes martyr lament of, 130–48, 150n.27, 152n.51, 153n.69 Solovetchik, Haym, 58 Song of Solomon, 135 Spanish Jews. See Andalusian Hebrew poetry; cemetery rituals of, 179n.76; liter-

INDEX

ary accomplishments of, 6; resistance by, 64 speech of martyrs, as motif in Blois laments, 59–62, 68n.51 Speyer, Jewish martyrs in, 30, 36, 82, 163 Spiegel, Shalom, 47 Stacey, Robert, 38, 40n.7 suicide, in martyrological poetry, 23–25, 51 “summarizing” symbols, 9, 16n.24, 118n.6 synagogue: Jonathan’s magic book narrative and, 158–59; reading of martyr poems in, 37–38, 71, 108, 133 Talmud: burning of, 4, 12, 31, 70, 72–90, 147, 156, 159, 170, 174n.14, 181; fireproof imagery in, 60; Meir’s lament on, 73–90; phylacteries discussed in, 161 Tambiah, 121n.38 Tanhuma, 166 taqqanot, 40n.7 Targum, 61–62, 68n.49 Tate, Claudia, 41n.18 tefillin, 158, 161, 169–70, 178n.70. See also phylacteries Temple cult, martyrological poetry and, 108–109 “Ten Martyrs,” 4, 15n.8, 83, 121n.45, 167 Thibaut, Count, 29, 45, 47–48, 66n.15 Thibaut of Champagne, 79 Third Crusade, laments from, 163, 165–66 tofsei-Torah, 166 Toldot Yeshu, 5 Torah: desecration of, 163–65, 172–73, 176n.39; feminine image of, 79–83 Tosafist schools: Blois martyrs and, 28–30, 42n.42, 46, 49–51, 58–59, 64; book burning and, 70–71, 73–74, 92n.17; burning of the Talmud and, 75; dialectical methods of, 70, 90n.2; influence of Spanish poetry on, 66n.21, 107; Jonathan’s magic book narrative and, 158– 59; martyrological poetry and, 7–9, 12, 18–19, 31, 34, 37, 180–82; resistance to conversion and, 19–20; Talmudic study as focus of, 71; Troyes martyr laments and, 132–33, 135–36 “To Tempt the Devil” (“Peh le-satan”), 185

INDEX

Troyes: Jewish community in, 45; letter on Blois martyrs from, 57, 68n.45; literary culture in, 8; martyrological laments from, 13, 22, 39, 44n.69,64, 68n.51, 73, 109, 126–48, 150n.22, 182 Tuvia of Vienne, 73 Uccello, Paolo, 156, 171 unity, as motif in martyrological poetry, 20–21, 26–27 Urban II (Pope), 2 Uri bar Joel HaLevi, 71, 75–78, 83, 89– 90, 163–64, 176n.41 Vauchez, Andr´e, 181 “Ve-etonen va-akonen” (I Shall Mourn and Lament), 40n.6 vernacular, laments in, 110–17, 133–48, 182–83, 186n.3 Victorines, 114 Vie de Saint Alexis, 182 Virgin Mary, 42n.30, 44n.70, 79–80, 181 “voluntary martyrdom,” in martyrological poetry, 23–24, 41n.17–18 Wachtel, David, 57, 67n.32, 68n.53, 148 Walter of Sens (Archbishop), 74 Weinberger, Leon, 52 wheel imagery: Blois martyrs and, 27–29; German martyrological poetry and, 31– 33, 37; Samson of Metz lament and, 110–17 William of Auvergne (Archbishop), 74

219 William of Newburgh, 66n.22 William of Norwich, 44n.84 William of Sens (Archbishop), 46 Wissenschaft scholarship, Jewish scholarship compared with, 119n.9 Wolfson, Elliot 15n.22 women: Blois martyrs as, 46–47; conversion patterns among, 25, 41n.24; as martyrs, 10, 28–29, 39, 44n.83, 121nn.43,45, 182–83 “Yah tishpokh hamatkha” ខ (Lord Pour Out Your Wrath), 51, 66n.21 Yedidiah b. Israel of Nirenberg, 179n.77 “Yegoni umar hiki,” ខ 66n.21 Yehiel ខ (Rabbi), 26, 55–56, 58, 70, 74–75, 91n.14, 93n.37, 179n.77 Yequtiel, 55–56, 58 Yo’etz bar Malkiel, 32 Yom Tov of Joigny (Rabbi), 29–30, 51– 52, 57–59, 62–64, 68n.49, 71 Yom Tov of London, story of, 25–26, 41n.28 York, Jewish martyrs in, 29–31, 51, 71, 163, 165–66, 168, 181 Yuval, Israel, 27, 171 zajal poetry genre, 150n.29 Zedekiah bar Abraham (Rabbi), 75 Zephaniah, Book of, Samson of Metz lament and, 111, 119n.18 A “Zion ha-lo tishali,” 78–79 Zionism, 103 “Zion” poems, 78–79