Marks of Distinctions: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages

Conclusion

320 Conclusion The Jews’ saturnine, melancholy nature is not to be explained simply by exterior influences attached to a particular clime, that is, by the “environmental thesis.” Rather, it seems that their complexional nature is also determined, for many Christian thinkers, by the natural power of the stars. One advantage of the astrological explanation is simply that it can support contradictory conclusions: it is consistent that an individual Jew might escape the influence of Saturn, while Jews as a group cannot. This makes the “astrological thesis” extraordinarily adaptable and resistant to empirical falsification. Consequently, although the “environmental thesis” alone may fail to explain why Jews should be perceived as “dark” in complexion when as a group they had been in exile in northern Europe for centuries, the “astrological thesis” can supply all that is required: Jews are, on the whole, melancholy; their melancholy complexion derives from their attachment to Saturn; and, the melancholy humor not only accounts for their psychological shortcomings and inclination to disease or illness, but also for the growing perception in late medieval Christian Europe that Jews were dark-skinned. Whether they could be transformed through conversion and baptism depended on a variety of factors: economics, politics, and religion. It seems that as the pressure increased on Jewish communities to convert, and as the number of Jewish converts grew dramatically, at precisely that moment the power of baptism to change the Jews’ appearance became subject to growing doubts. Although in some instances somatic change followed baptism—as in the case of the Jewish boy in the Cantigas de Santa Maria who undergoes a “miraculous rhinoplasty” after receiving communion, or the change suggested by the English subtitle to R. Samuel of Morocco’s Book on the Already Accom- conclusion 321 plished Advent of the Messiah, namely, A Blackamoor Made White—there are other cases surely when it is seems that after baptism Jewish converts remained distinguished still by a Jewish odor, appearance, or by an unnatural bloody flux akin to menstruation. After baptism Jewish males remained indelibly marked by their circumcision, both as a physical sign and as a symbol of their inclination to error and vice. The presence of this sign undermined confidence in the authenticity of their religious transformation, as evidenced in the report in the Letters of Obscure Men (Epistolae obscurorum virorum) of a quodlibetal disputation in which theologians argued that when a Jew becomes a Christian his foreskin will be restored to him, just as some theologians had argued that at his resurrection Jesus’ foreskin had been restored to his body. The continued absence of the foreskin in Jewish converts to Christianity, then, could be seen as a sign of continuing infidelity. Similarly, we have seen the assumption that Jews reveal a bloody flux akin to menstruation that can only be healed by conversion to Christianity . Indeed, The Book of Peter Madsen, Curate at St. Peter’s Church in Ribe (Denmark), a handbook for preachers from the second half of the fifteenth century, states explicitly that this bloody flux in Jews will cease if they are converted and baptized.1 Nonetheless, claims that this bodily condition persists among Spanish conversos will not only point to the imperfect character of their baptism or faith, but it also could be invoked as a scientific test of their Christian conversion. As a result, just as Juan de Quiñones will invoke the myth of Jewish male menses to help the Inquisition to identify crypto-Jews, the foetor Judaicus will be invoked to achieve the same end, and in Spanish anti-converso polemics a repulsive body odor was attributed to Jewish converts that even the waters of baptism could not fully eradicate. That this conviction also had travelled to Germany and central Europe is evident in the Letters of Obscure Men, which would reveal the Jewish convert Johannes Pfefferkorn to be a false Christian because although “it is commonly said that when Jews are baptized they cease to stink,” “[Pfefferkorn] still stank like any other Jew.” Not only were Jewish converts still differentiated by the absence of 1. See Liber Petri Mathie curati ecclesie sancti petri Ripis, transcribed by Anne Riising from Msc. Ny kgl. Samling 123 4º, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, fol. 347r, p. 674 (available at http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles//Files/Om_SDU/Institutter/Ihks/Projekter/Middelalderstudier /Ny_Peder_Madsen.pdf). 322   conclusion the foreskin, by allegations of menstrual bleeding, and by a distinctive and offensive...