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60 5 : The inquisiTion and The Jews oF FranCe in The TiMe oF bernard gui Harvard Theological Review 63:3 (July 1970), 317–376. This sixty-page article in the prestigious Harvard Theological Review was based on Yerushalmi’s master’s thesis at Columbia under Salo Baron. The paper was originally intended for inclusion in a book to be published in 1964, but the book never appeared.Yerushalmi’s article was instead published six years later, in 1970, when he was an assistant professor at Harvard. This article represents Yerushalmi’s first sustained piece of original research to be published. It contains a number of themes that frequently recur in his later research on Iberian Jewry, as well as motifs that would not surface again. The most obvious link between this work and later scholarly writings is the central focus on the Inquisition as an agent of inquiryand punishment against converted Jews.The historical milieu of interest here, though, is not the early modern Sephardic world, for which he would gain such renown, but rather the medieval Ashkenazic world. The young Yerushalmi demonstrated considerable mastery over medieval French history, as well as over the history of French Jews in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—the latter a rather scattered affair owing to the frequent edicts of expulsion directed against them (e.g., 1306, 1322, and 1394). In studying this period in French Jewish history, he followed in the path of his teacher, Baron, as well as scholars such as Solomon Reinach, Isidore Loeb, Israel Lévi, Louis Newman, and Adolf Kisch. He noted here that the dearth of primary sources made this era a relatively dark one in terms of historical research. Nonetheless, its potential to shed light on later periods,Yerushalmi insisted, was substantial, especially on the roots of the Spanish Inquisition. At the center of this article was the Dominican priest and scholar Bernard Gui, who served for sixteen years (1307–1323) as Inquisitor of Toulouse. More importantly for Yerushalmi, Bernard Gui published a five-part inquisitorial manual in 1323–4, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis. Yerushalmi set out to analyze those parts of the Practica that dealt with Jews (i.e., converts from Judaism) or Jewish-related affairs. He commenced this task by situating Gui and the Jews of France in historical context, noting the tensions that arose between secular and ecclesiastical authorities when dealing with the Jews.Whereas the former sought to extend protections to Jews as a means of safeguarding their own economic interests, ecclesiastical authorities such as Bernard Gui were intent on defending the interests of the Church against heretics. The Inquisition was an important new instrument in this battle, introduced in Toulouse in 1229 to bring to heel The InquIsITIon and The Jews of france | 61 a group of perceived heretics known as Albigensians or Cathars. Notwithstanding the fact that both Albigensians and Jews came under inquisitorial scrutiny in Toulouse, Yerushalmi insisted, contra Louis Newman, that there was no evidence whatsoever of links between them, or, more specifically, of Jewish influence on the Albigensians.There were, however, Jews who had converted in the fourteenth century, often under duress, whom the Inquisition subsequently accused of relapse to Judaism. Yerushalmi examined here the case of one of the “relapsi,” as they were known, Baruch, who fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisitorial Tribunal of Pamiers in 1320. It was on the basis of such cases that Bernard Gui produced his Practica— and particularly the “Interrogation Formula” used against “relapsi” that Yerushalmi dissected carefully. On the basis of his evaluation, he concluded that, in both theory and practice, “the Inquisition in France was but the laboratory in which the inquisitorial mechanism was first tested,” yielding an instrument that was “already complete in most details” and would be used on a mass scale and to devastating effect in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of this article, Yerushalmi already staked out a position on one of the most contentious issues concerning the Inquisition. As against thewell-known view of Benzion Netanyahu in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (1995) and other writings, Yerushalmi assumed the sincerity of inquisitors such as Gui in believing that there were indeed Judaizing heretics alive and at work in their midst. Concomitantly, Yerushalmi sought in the latter portion of the article to understand the world of the “relapsi,” in particular by piecing together evidence from the Practica and other sources to argue for a set...

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