Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Middle Ages) - Hardcover

Szpiech, Ryan

 
9780812244717: Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Middle Ages)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812244710 ISBN 13: 9780812244717
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness.

In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith.

Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ryan Szpiech teaches Spanish literature and Jewish studies at the University of Michigan.

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Introduction

Conversion and History

The past is never dead. It is not even past.
—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

The Dream of Rabbi Abner

There was once a Jew who, well into his adult life, began to think deeply about the trials of his people. One day, he entered a synagogue and, with lamentation and bitterness in his heart, began to pray, "Lord God, I beg you, have mercy on our trials. What is the cause of your anger and fury against your people, the sheep of your pasture? Why will the nations say, 'Where is their God?' Lord, hear now my prayer and my cries, and illuminate your desolate sanctuary. Have mercy on your people Israel." And with great heaviness of heart, exhausted from the burden he had taken upon himself, this Jew grew tired, fell asleep in the synagogue, and began to dream. In his dream he met a great man who said to him, "Why do you sleep? Understand my words, and pay attention: The Jews are in such long exile because of their insanity and their ignorance, and because they lack a righteous teacher in whom they may know the truth." When he awoke from his dream, he began to scour the Bible and books of religion and philosophy for explanations to his questions, but he only grew more doubtful and confused, and vowed to remain steadfast in the faith of his forefathers and not to pay heed to the doubts in his heart. Yet his tribulations and doubts persisted, and his dreams did not stop. A few years later, after spending the day fasting, he had another dream in which the same man appeared and scolded him angrily. The man ordered the Jew "to arise from his sleep," telling him, "You are responsible for the sins of all of the Jews and their children and future generations." Miraculously, as he said this, the great man made crosses appear all over his clothing. The Jew awoke, and after dreaming this same dream repeatedly over many nights, he finally vowed to convert to Christianity and to write a book in defense of his new faith.

Such is the story told by the Castilian Jew Abner of Burgos (ca. 1265/70-ca. 1347), known after his conversion as Alfonso of Valladolid or Master Alfonso (Maestre Alfonso), in the opening of his lengthy anti-Jewish polemic, Teacher of Righteousness (Moreh ?edek), composed in Hebrew in the early 1320s. The text, which survives only in a contemporary Castilian translation under the title Mostrador de justicia, is one of the longest anti-Jewish works written in the Middle Ages, comparable to the enormous Dagger of Faith (Pugio fidei) from 1278 by the Dominican Ramon Martí (Raimundus Martinus). Unlike Martí's Dagger, however, Abner/Alfonso's Teacher is written from a first-person perspective that begins with a narrative account of the author's conversion.

Who was this sorrowful Jew, dreaming of crosses in a synagogue? A variety of sources, including archival documents and polemical treatises written by Jews and Christians, confirm the existence of a real person named Abner of Burgos who did become a Christian around 1320, took the new name Alfonso of Valladolid, and wrote a series of anti-Jewish works in Hebrew, including the Teacher. Was Abner/Alfonso, the double-named author of this first-person account, the same man who in the text prayed and dreamed and converted? It seems obvious that the author was also the character in his first-person narrative, and at first blush there is no reason to doubt that this conversion account describes the author's experience. There is, however, virtually no information to be found about the real conversion of the author, Abner/Alfonso himself, beyond what can be gleaned from his autobiographical account. We must assume that it happened as he narrates it.

Or must we? Behind the composition of his book, we might imagine that there is the experience of the real author that led to the actual event of his conversion, which we know must have occurred shortly before the account of it was composed. Are we correct, therefore, in seeing the elements of this conversion narrative as representations, perhaps embellished but accurate nonetheless, of actual events as well? The great historian of Iberian Jewry, Yitzhak Baer, who maintained a lifelong interest in Abner/Alfonso, believed we are. After summarizing the same account given above, he remarks, "Abner wrestled in spirit for some twenty-five years until (shortly before the year 1321) he announced his profession of the Christian faith."1 Historians like Baer can date the public announcement of his new faith and consider it as a historical fact (although since we know of no one else who was there to hear such an announcement and tell of it, even this depends on Abner/Alfonso's own testimony to a good degree), but Abner/Alfonso's feelings before his conversion are more problematic. We only know that he "wrestled in spirit for some twenty-five years," as Baer says, because Abner/Alfonso himself tells us he did, and he constructed his story to be read as part of his attack on his former faith. Although one can verify through later evidence external to the text that Abner/Alfonso was a real person who did profess Christianity, the process of that conversion is available only through the account by the author himself written after the fact. Perhaps the author Abner/Alfonso did indeed "wrestle in spirit" (whatever this might mean) just as his character did, but his autobiographical testimony can only tell us about the struggles of his fictional counterpart. As Karl Morrison insists in his study of medieval conversion, one must distinguish between the experience of conversion, the "thing felt," and the document written about it, the "thing made."

This book studies the "thing made" to represent conversion in a variety of medieval works that discuss religious belief and identity, in particular polemical works directed against other religions. In exploring the contours of that "thing made," I consider not only its form and content but also its placement within, and in relation to, other texts. Although my focus is mainly on deliberately constructed accounts like Abner/Alfonso's, the study includes other sources, such as examples of religious polemic and disputation as well as historiography and exegesis. I focus on medieval Christian texts, principally from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, but also consider the late antique paradigms on which those texts were modeled, and I contextualize the developments in those stories by comparing them to contemporary narratives of conversion to Judaism and Islam as well. While this broad view includes material from across the Mediterranean, as well as from farther north and east, it focuses on the Western Mediterranean as a center around which there circulated competing and complementary currents of belief in the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The central question I aim to address is what place such first-person stories had in the discourse of religious apology and polemic. Although I focus heavily on Christian sources, I ask the same question of treatises from all three Abrahamic religions: Why did polemical writers tell these stories? What connection did a writer like Abner/Alfonso see between his story and his theological criticism of Judaism? How would a Jewish reader of this Hebrew text understand such a personal narrative? Most important, how did such stories convey meaning as stories? In pursuing these questions, this book attempts to provide a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious dispute by viewing it through the lens of literary studies.

By including examples from such separate historical moments and places of origin, I do not at all mean to blur the essential differences that define them or to suggest an absolute homogeneity of either thought or purpose across...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812244710
ISBN 13 
9780812244717
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
311
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

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Breda
4831 GR
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