The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History and Fiction in the Twelfth Century (review)

Schmitt's study of the "Short Work About His Conversion," attributed to "Herman the former Jew," was published in 2003 to great acclaim and appears here in a somewhat awkward and occasionally inaccurate English translation. An appropriate sequel to Schmitt's earlier work on folktales, dreams, gestures, and ghosts—as well as to the concerns of earlier practitioners, such as Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, of what is sometimes called historical anthropology—Schmitt's book tackles squarely the debates over the "Short History" that have raged since Avrom Saltman proposed in 1988 that no such person as Herman ever existed. Arguing against Gerlinde Niemeyer's efforts, in her edition of 1963, to flesh out information about the author, Saltman took the Opusculum as a polemical work written by twelfth-century Christians for their coreligionists—a view that was made far more subtle in 1992 by Karl Morrison, who continued to see the treatise as proselytizing but argued that we need to move away from oppositions such as truth versus fiction and focus on the structure of the text itself. Following Morrison but interpreting the Opusculum as produced by a community of regular canons in order to reinforce their understanding of their own life as a form of conversion, Schmitt argues that texts—no matter which members of a group put their pens to parchment—are constructed by the communities within which they are drawn up and the audiences for which they are intended. It is an argument with which historians are by now very familiar, so much so that Sarah McNamer, among others, has recently proposed that the recipients of a text are its true "authors."

Many laudatory reviews have focused on Schmitt's book as yet another nail in the lid of the coffin within which the late twentieth century has buried positivist historical scholarship. But this is far from the study's most interesting aspect. Its middle chapters place the major themes of the Opusculum in a broad context and deal in a sophisticated fashion with differences between dreams, visions, and ecstasies; with the complexities of twelfth-century Christian-Jewish polemic; with Christian defenses of images; and with the widespread paradigm of conversion from flesh to spirit that organized Christian responses to objects and places as well as persons. Even in its conclusion that the author of the Opusculum may be the community of Cappenberg canons, within which a converted Jew perhaps lived, Schmitt's study suggests a historiographical emphasis more novel than the idea that history is constructed—that is, an emphasis, paralleling the recent work of Israel Yuval and Elisheva Baumgarten, on the fact that Jews and Christians lived together and influenced each other in the Rhineland world of the twelfth century.