Masked Jews: Conversion and Secret Identities in Late Medieval Iberia

The rabbis of France were troubled, on account of a convert. According to a query they sent to Rabbi Solomon ibn Adret—chief rabbi of Barcelona in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries—there was a convert to Christianity who "was going from place to place, and in one city he tells the non-Jews that he believes in their idol worship, and in another city he enters the House of Israel and says that he is a Jew, and we do not know if he is a Jew or not."¹ The problem posed by this particular convert was sufficiently serious that it required these French rabbis to look beyond their own community and to seek an opinion from a well-respected rabbi across the Pyrenees.

While most converts sought to maintain more stable post-conversion identities than this man, conversion by its very nature highlighted the porousness of religious boundaries between medieval Christians and Jews. Religious identity was not in fact inherent; a convert might exchange one faith for another. This particular convert further blurred boundaries through his failure to maintain a stable identity. By adopting and shedding his Jewish and Christian selves as he went from city to city, he implied that religious identity was fluid rather than fixed.

The French rabbis and their Iberian interlocutor ibn Adret showed little interest in the perspective of Christians, whom they polemically identified as practitioners of idol worship (avodah zarah) but otherwise ignored.² Yet they might have found in Christian authorities an unexpected ally in their efforts to unequivocally define this convert's identity. The thirteenth-century Christian "dream of conversion" relied on the central assumption that Jews (as well as Muslims) might be persuaded of the truth of Christianity, and that their subsequent conversion would bring about a complete and seamless transformation.³ Converts who failed to fully transition to an exclusively Christian identity found themselves subject to inquisitorial prosecution and, if they failed to repent and change their behavior, execution.⁴ The French royal authorities who exercised jurisdiction over this particular convert might have worked to preserve their own authority over Jews in the face of that of the Inquisition, but ultimately provided little protection to converts who illicitly reverted to their previous faith.⁵ In other words, medieval Christian authorities would have immediately sought to categorize this convert—not as a Jew or a Christian—but as either a repentant Christian or an irredeemable one.

The French rabbis who came into contact with this convert demonstrated their own anxieties about categorization. This convert's profession rendered his blurring of boundaries particularly problematic from a legal perspective: he made and sold wine. Biblical and rabbinic prohibitions forbade Jews from consuming or deriving benefit from wine made or owned by non-Jews. Although the term ibn Adret used, yayin nesekh, more properly refers to wine employed in idolatrous rituals, medieval rabbis frequently employed the term more broadly to refer to all wine manufactured by non-Jews.⁶ The rabbis' struggle to classify this particular convert definitively as a Jew or as a non-Jew stemmed in part from concerns over the real legal implications of his religious identity.

In his response, ibn Adret suggested that the convert's own interior faith should dictate the status of the wine he made. If, when he identifies himself as a Jew, "he says it with his whole heart, because his faith is a righteous, good, and correct faith," his wine is acceptable even if he also falsely claims before Christians that he believes in their religion. In contrast, if he publicly desecrates the Sabbath and rejects the teachings of the rabbis, his wine should be considered yayin nesekh. While ibn Adret took seriously the convert's own interiority and self-perception, he nevertheless did not allow for the possibility that the convert might have a complex identity that defied efforts to construct a binary opposition between good Jews and Christian idol worshipers.

Methodology: Converts, Superheroes, and Secret Identities

This paper explores the shifting and dual identities of medieval converts in the Iberian Peninsula...