Conversion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

... in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 3, scene 5

I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

—Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

ONE

Christian interest in the conversion of the Jews is as old as Christianity itself. In its earliest years, immediately following the death of Jesus, his followers labored to spread their version of their ancestral faith, with its identification of Jesus as the messiah, among their fellow Jews. There was little that was extraordinary in this, since the Jewish population in the Land of Israel was divided at the time into various sects, each of which asserted its own distinctive religious claims. Then, in the second half of the first century, Christianity ceased to be an exclusively Jewish sect. Its apostles—Paul above all—shifted its doctrinal outlook, broadening it to encompass Gentiles and severing its links with Jewish practice and scriptural interpretation. They created a "universal" religion, one whose goal was the salvation of humankind, rather than a "national" one, whose concern was the fate of one people. Because its aspirations were transnational, Christianity was a missionary faith from its inception. Spreading the Good News, the evangelion, to all the peoples of the world was at its core. It did not, it could not, look with indifference on those who had never heard its message or those who, having heard, rejected or ignored it. In this sense, Christianity was radically different from other religions and cults in the Roman Empire, including the various Jewish sects, which tended to be indifferent to the spiritual fate of those outside their own community.

Christian concern with the evangelization of the Jews was particularly intense. This was because Christianity came into the world as a Jewish sect, claiming to be the heir of biblical Israel and arbiter of its scriptural tradition. The validation of its own claims required the negation of Jewish claims. The key figure in this process was the apostle Paul, a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia in Asia Minor, who embraced Jesus after a conversionary experience on the road to Damascus. Paul created the theological foundation for the Christian understanding of Judaism, especially its attitude toward the Torah and the Jewish past that Christianity claimed as its own. This foundation shaped Christian thinking about the conversion of the Jews and continues to influence Western attitudes toward Jews to this day, even in secular circles. Because Paul started with and built on Hebrew scripture and, thus, the history of biblical Israel, he needed to reconfigure the Jewish understanding of its relationship to God. He accepted that the Hebrew Bible was God's revelation and that the Jews were the people to whom this revelation had been made and with whom God had made a covenant (the signs of which were circumcision and the commandments). But the coming of Jesus, according to Paul, enlarged the arena of divine history, making God and salvation available to all humankind. Faith in Jesus—as the messiah, the savior whose death atoned for human sin—replaced observance of the commandments (including the Temple sacrifices). God's promises to the Jews remained operative, but the definition of Israel, the recipient of those promises, was recast. The followers of Jesus, rather than old-style commandment-observing circumcised Jews, became the true Israel. They were now the elect, or chosen, of God.

What then of the Jews? For their denial of Jesus (as well as earlier rebellions against God), they were to endure, for the time, divinely imposed punishment. In Paul's words, "God's wrath has come upon them at last!" (I Thessalonians 2:16). (Later the Church Fathers saw evidence of God's wrath in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Jews' dispersion.) Paul's condemnation of the Jews, however, was tempered by his belief that because they were the first chosen of God, the recipients of his law, the split between Jews and the church would not last forever. As God's first love, the Jews would be reconciled to him in the future—when they saw the error of their ways, repented, and were converted. He envisioned their reconciliation with God and the true Israel in his famous olive-tree metaphor in Romans 11:17–24, in which he likened Jews to broken branches of an olive tree and Christians to wild olive shoots "grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree." After reminding Christians not to gloat over their ascendance, since "it is not you that support the root [God's initial revelation to biblical Israel] but the root that supports you," he emphasized that God's call to the Jews was irrevocable: "For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these branches be grafted back into their own live tree." For Paul and, later, for the Church Fathers, the reattachment of the Jews to the olive tree of Christian belief was divinely foreordained. God had not rejected "his people whom he foreknew," for they were "beloved for the sake of their forefathers" (Romans 11:2, 28).

Paul's recasting of God's relationship to the Jews, especially as rearticulated by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), became normative, influencing the treatment of Jews by both the state and the church for centuries afterward. Its influence was critical in three ways. First, it assigned the Jews a place within the divine economy of salvation. At the beginning of history, according to Paul, the Jews received God's revelation and law; at its end, they would be reconciled with God, their return signaling (or catalyzing, in some accounts) the final redemption. This formula was critical to the survival of Europe's Jews in the medieval period, for assigning them a purpose in the divine drama of salvation created a theological barrier to their elimination. It did not prevent churchmen from disparaging Jews, or princes from maltreating them—indeed, Paul's critique fueled Christian hostility—but it did become an ideological obstacle to their mass destruction. Second, by linking Christian salvation to the fate of the Jews, it prevented Christianity from ignoring them, either in theory or practice. Unlike religions that emerged outside the orbit of Judaism, Christianity could not simply leave Jews alone. Woven into its very fabric was an impulse to undo their error, to transform them into Christians. In some periods this impulse was strongly felt; in...