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Negotiating the Crisis of Identity:
Medieval European Hebrew Literature

Throughout medieval Europe, many newly-formed civilizations were facing the crisis of identity. Defining the boundaries of community created a whole new method of understanding one's surroundings and neighbors. Tribal community became extremely important, as is evident in the deeply affectionate relationships between a king or leader and his retainers and the massive importance of the mead hall in early Anglo-Saxon literature such as Beowulf. Because of this strange new desire or need to define the boundaries not only of the self, but the community, via exclusion of the Other, violence became a norm (see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's "The Ruins of Identity" for a discussion of monsterization, a form of psychic violence, driven by the quest for identity). This is not to say that violence had not ever been, nor continues to be a norm in Western, or any other, civilization, only that the drive to define the Self requires acts of violence both psychic/emotional and physical that extend beyond the individual psyche and into the interactions of increasingly close tribal and cultural groups.
Medieval Hebrew literature, like much of the literature of any culture at the time, seeks to define and preserve Jewish identity in this time of crisis. The Crusades and disputations, products of the Christian crisis of identity, battered the Jewish populations of Europe, resulting in the expression of voices of response or defense in some literature and narratives, which evolved into a new style or genre within the Hebrew-speaking community. The anonymous S Narrative, which tells of the slaughter and suicides of the 1028 (or 1068), combined history and archetyping to create heroes and mythologies of contemporary events. The apostasy that resulted from these Crusades and the alternative disputations of other societies resulted in another crisis of identity for both Christians and Jews. Pablo Christiani, a Jew of King James's Barcelona embodied this crisis and is key in understanding both the role of Jews in the mass conversions of the Middle Ages as well as the varied expressions of trauma experienced by the Jewish communities.
Though it is easiest to think of European Jewry as a single and cohesive society, and indeed this paper proposes that an attempt to form such a community did occur, other texts, including Pablo Christiani's report of the Barcelona Disputation, reveal a hierarchy or schism within the community. As Jonathon Boyarin explains in his modern essay, "Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark of the Male Jew", there are centers to the margins that allow the marginal identity to exist as a marginal identity. Some of the Fox Fables of Berechiah ha-Nakdan express the attempts of some within the Jewish community to establish and preserve Biblical righteousness within European Jewish communities. In this way, the literature serves to define Jewish identity. However, this serves to further marginalize some within the community, leading to a dual marginality for such men as Pablo Christiani, the apostate who aided the Church in the conversion of Jews to Christianity in Barcelona, Spain.
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to define Jewish identity or to identify every aspect of European culture that had a hand in shaping said identity, an attempt will be made to identify the aspects of the discussed texts that seek to define or preserve Jewish identity in the face of Christian oppression and attempted genocide. Literature serves as one tool of European Jewish community to negotiate, establish, and defend Jewish identity. Of course, the Jewish communities of Europe did not exist in a cultural vacuum. The dominant Christian communities played a key role in shaping and defining what it meant to be a Jew in Europe, and how Jews responded to the dominant culture and its attempts to wipe out the Jewish people.
As stated above, interaction with the Christian community shaped some of the literature produced by medieval Hebrew writers in Europe. Moses ben Nachman's report of the Barcelona Disputation is greatly shaped by his dialogue with Christianity (beyond the obvious fact that it is the report of his actual dialogue with Christians seeking to convert him). The official, sanctioned, version of this debate was published by the other disputant, Pablo Christiani, an apostate who had converted to Christianity in response to the massacre of Jews in which his entire family was murdered (to be discussed later). Christiani's apostasy raises the issue of conversion throughout the terrorized Jewish populations of Europe. This issue is addressed in several Medieval Hebrew texts, and the fear of mass, or any, conversion in response to the Christian/Latin report of the disputation may have been Moses ben Nachman's reason for publishing his account of the Barcelona Disputation, an action from which he had been expressly banned by both King James I of Barcelona, who until that point had been very tolerant, even accommodating, of Nachman, and the Pope, who had encouraged the disputation solely for the purpose of converting, if not Nachman himself, then Nachman's fellows and followers.
It is evident, at least, that Nachman's report of the disputation was written in defense. Robert Chazan makes clear in his "The Barcelona 'Disputation' of 1263: Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response" that the Jewish participants in the Jewish-Christian disputations of medieval Europe were on the defense from the very conceptualization of the 'debates'. Chazan notes that it was the Christian Church, in the form of the Dominican sect and the Pope who pressured King James into holding the disputation. The political nature of this particular disputation makes it all the more dubious in nature: King James feared the Church's challenging of his position as ruler of Aragon, and felt the need to appease the Pope and the Christians who felt that he was far too lenient in his dealings with and multiple relationships with the Jewish population of his kingdom. Much was at stake in the outcome, not only for the fearful Jewish community, but for the king himself. Therefore, the debate was ordered to take place, and the Jewish participant, Moses ben Nachman cannot be said to have any choice in the matter.
Chazan explores the texts of both reports of the disputation and finds further evidence that the Jewish disputant was intentionally put on the defense from the beginning. Not only was Moses ben Nachman coerced into the disputation (a debate that was itself coerced by the Christian parties involved), but the subject matter as clearly chosen by the Christian disputant/s. The matters to be discussed_"the subject of the Messiah, whether he has already come as Christians believe, or whether he is yet to come as Jews believe, . . . whether the Messiah was truly divine, or entirely human, orn from a man and a woman, . . . [and] whether the Jews still possess the true law, or whether the Christians practice it" (Maccoby, 103), according to Nachman's report, "matters which are fundamental to the argument" (103) between Christians and Jews; and according to Pablo Christiani's officially sanctioned report, "that the Messiah . . . whom the Jews expect, has undoubtedly come ; further, that the Messiah himself, as had been prophesied, must be both God and man; further, that legal or ceremonial matters ceased and had to cease after the coming of the said Messiah" (147-148)_were chosen by the Christians and were to be both argued for and defended against fro the Christian texts, immediately setting the Jews in the position of defense. Nachman's task was to defend his religion from the attacks of the apostate Pablo Christiani, who would have knowledge of the Jewish texts from which the evidence and arguments for both sides were to be drawn.
According to Chazan, "even without converting his listeners, Paul would have achieved much by advancing his arguments, finding no decisive flaw, and hearing Jewish objections which he might subsequently learn to dispute" (830). The carefully controlled environment of the 'debate', in which Nachman's replies would be limited according to laws against blasphemy or heresy and public outcry of any statement that might be deemed disrespectful, would easily allow for this kind of outcome, which would be crushing to the Jewish community. The publication of Christiani's report, which, though published in Latin rather than Hebrew, would pose yet another threat to the solidity of the Jewish community of Barcelona. Nachman's report must, by necessity, be defensive in voice and nature.
This defensiveness accounts for the self-championing seen throughout Nachman's report, in which he gently, though condescendingly, corrects Pablo Christiani's misunderstandings and misreadings of the Jewish texts. Nachman's report reads much like a Classic philosophical text, in which the Master is asked a question or is posed a later-proved faulty argument and then proceeds to expound upon why his view is correct, eliciting only "yes", "of course", etc. from his students and audience. Pablo Christiani's dialogue in Nachman's report is often short and easily corrected, whereas Nachman's own replies are lengthy, poetic, and inarguably correct. A man defending himself against accusations of being unable to reply, stricken silent by the inarguable truth of his opponent's argument, could easily counteract the claim by painting himself as eloquent and well-versed. Pablo Christiani, then, in Nachman's report, is foolish, easily angered, and almost even cartoonish in his angry responses to Nachman's well-spoken arguments:
". . . Now I shall bring you many other proofs from the words of the prophets."
That man cried out, "This is always his way, to make long-winded speeches. But I have a question to ask" (122).
After this passage, the king reminds Nachman that Christiani is the "questioner" and that Nachman is merely there to defend himself and Judaism from what seems at this point to be simply accusations of blatantly ignoring the grand Truth of Christianity and choosing, rather, to believe blasphemy and heresy. That Moses ben Nachman felt the need to write a defense of both himself and his religion is hardly surprising.
This need to defend against external accusations and internal apostasy and assimilation runs throughout other literature of European Jewry: The "S" Narrative, an anonymous Hebrew Crusade chronicle from the Ashkenaz region of medieval Germany expresses similar anxieties, though with a different kind of urgency. Whereas Nachman sought to defend his own reputation and to prevent possible conversions, the "S" Narrative represents a whole new genre of Hebrew literature, memorializing, even canonizing, the slain and self-sacrificed Jews of the 1096 massacre in Ashkenaz, praising those who committed suicide in acts of preserving Jewish purity rather than being slain by Christian swords or being forcefully converted to Christianity. The fact that the author survived the events, if s/he was present, lends ambiguity to the motive for the creation of this text and others like it: questions of modern psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and survivors' guilt arise. Similar readings can be applied to Pablo Christiani.
Reading Christian texts which chronicle the same events, as well as other historical narratives which tell of the environment in which these massacres took place reveals even more about the "S" Narrative and others of its kind: the narratives are a response to impending Christian culture as well as a way of confessing, understanding, witnessing, and/or justifying the events of the Crusades. In this way, the Narrative plays a key role in negotiating and defending medieval European Jewish identity. Simultaneously, the Narrative can be read as, if nor direct response, then highly influenced by contemporary Christian texts regarding martyrdom in the Crusades.
David Malkiel's article, "Destruction or Conversion: Intention and Reaction, Crusaders and Jews, in 1096", discusses the common modern readings of the "S" Narrative and other Hebrew and Latin Crusade chronicles of Ashkenaz. He addresses some of misconceptions and interpretations of the actions and motivations of the Crusaders and the slain Jews. Conversion is often stated as the goal of the Christian Crusaders by both the authors of the texts and by modern scholars: the Christians intend to baptize and bring to Christ all who they encounter in their travels to the Holy Land. The Hebrew chronicles are responsive to this in their description, and later interpretation, of the massacres of Jews by the Crusaders; any death at the hand of the Crusaders, including the mass suicides and infanticides committed by the Jews, was martyrdom: the heroes and heroines of the Narrative chose death over conversion to a false and heretical faith. However, Malkiel points out, and a close reading of the "S" Narrative reveals, that conversion and baptism were far from the primary goals of the Crusaders. A choice to convert or die was not given to the slain. From the beginning of the "S" Narrative this is clear.
The Mainz Anonymous states from the outset of his narrative that the Crusaders intended to "do battle and clear a way for journeying to Jerusalem", "to kill and subjugate the Jews, who killed and crucified him [Jesus of Nazareth]" (225). Intentions to completely wipe out the Jewish population of the Rhineland are restated throughout the "S" Narrative: they "destroy[ed] vine and stock all along the way to Jerusalem" (226), stating that "'anyone who kills a single Jew will have all his sins absolved'" (226). The Crusaders plan to leave not a "remnant" (228, etc.) of Jewish blood unshed in Ashkenaz. According to Malkiel, the Latin narratives demonstrate the same motives in the actions of the Crusaders in the Rhineland. When baptism or conversion did take place, it was by force and only followed gruesome violence. Not once in the "S" Narrative is baptism mentioned as a choice to precede massacre. It is only after a person has been tortured that s/he is offered baptism, only after seeing his community razed. It is understandable that Moses ben Nachman would be nervous about his participation in the Barcelona Disputation and the fallout that would later occur. His need to defend himself and Judaism with his illegal text is understandable.
This reexamination of the motives of the Crusaders asks the reader of the "S" Narrative to also reexamine the motives of the Jewish martyrs who have been glorified for maintaining religious purity at the eve of most assured destruction. Jeremy Cohen's article, "Between Martyrdom and Apostasy: Doubt and Self-Definition in Twelfth-Century Ashkenaz" and Shmuel Shepkaru's "To Die for God: Martyrs' Heaven in Hebrew and Latin Crusade Narratives" offer a new perspective to the reader of the "S" Narrative.
The paradigm of a special Heaven, or a specific place in Heaven, for martyrs arose in both Christian and Hebrew cultures around the same time. The idea seems to have bled into Jewish cosmology from the Christian culture through close interactions and the (more peaceful) polemics between the two. Prior to the First Crusade, there was no specific place or reward for martyrs in the Jewish concept of the after-life. Tales of extreme sacrifice are seen throughout the Bible and Torah, praising the patience and faith of these servants of God, they are not glorified in the same way as the martyrs of the Crusades, who are treated as the Christians do their own saints. Shepkaru holds that this comes as a result of the blending and interaction of the two cultures of the time. The differences that are maintained between the two Heavens, the two paradigms of martyrdom, are evidence that the Hebrew chronicles are a response to the Christian chronicles: an argument or rebuttal to the Latin boasting and self-glorification.
The greed, bloodlust, and general avarice of the Crusaders is described in detail (and is also mentioned in the Latin chronicles, which pinpoint this undisciplined ravaging as the reason for the failure of the Crusades in Ashkenaz), painting the Crusaders as cruel, beastly, monstrous beings who seek nothing more noble than to bleed dry the community of Mainz. It is not difficult to see the entire narrative, then, as a response to the contemporary Christian chronicles which glorify and canonize the Crusaders; one that is greatly shaped by the tropes and styles of the Christian culture and texts with which the Jewish writers of the texts were experiencing greater and greater dialogue and assimilation.
Cohen explores the acculturation of the Jewish communities in the Rhineland and reads the Hebrew chronicles as saying, "Our martyrdom, the atonement it effected, and the salvation it secured were genuine, yours were not. Our martyrs surpass your martyrs, and even your Martyr par excellence" (435.) The exaggerated numbers and glorified gore serve to elevate the experience of the martyrs of Mainz to that of sainthood, placing the slain in the same kind of Heavenly context as that in which Christians place their own martyrs.
Cohen continues his analysis of the narratives and the culture that arose from them, finding something akin to survivors' guilt in both the actual narratives and other contemporary texts. Those who survived the Crusades often did so by converting to Christianity. Albeit a sometimes temporary conversion, this apostasy was a sin, a shame to the community. Pablo Christiani's experience falls in with this group. Perhaps it is this guilt that drove him to become a kind of crusader for the Church. The experience of those who seek refuge in the church in the "S" Narrative can be read as a metaphor for those who sought refuge in the Church during the Crusades: they lived in the dark, hungry and thirty, barely kept physically alive. They were eventually betrayed by their Christian protectors to the murderers, as the converted would be betrayed to eternal death or death in sin by their conversion.
Those who survived the Crusades were left with fear and indecisiveness: death or conversion? Which is the worse? Guilt and self-doubt plagued the community. From this deep and painful place in the cultural collective conscious of the Ashkenazic Jews came the stories of great martyrdom and heroism in the face of possible cultural extinction. Whether or not the slain were actually offered the choice of survival though conversion seems irrelevant at the time of the telling of this traumatic story. Those killed maintained their purity: rather than dying at the hand of the uncircumcised, they sacrificed themselves to God, never permitting the Gentiles to corrupt them. This can read as an almost direct rebuttal to the Latin narratives that tell of attempts to "save" the Jews or that glorify slain Crusaders.
Berechiah ha-Nakdan's "Fox Fables" contain similar elements of preservation, glorification, and response. The direct urgency and trauma of the reports of the Barcelona Disputation and the "S" Narrative is not present in Nakdan's fables, but a preoccupation with the state of Jewish identity in Nakdan's contemporary France dominates and shapes many of the inventive fictional tales in the collection. The use of coded language, as revealed in the poetic "parables" at the end of some of the tales, hints to the reader that the stories are not merely about furry little forest creatures or simple morality, but that the lion of the stories may be the Lion of Judah and that multiple lessons may need to be puzzled out of the tales. This complexity of meaning in the fables creates some difficulty in addressing and understanding Nakdan's intentions in writing and casting the stories as he did, but an attempt will be made here to apply some possible interpretations to the stories in order to understand them in the dialogue of fashioning and defending medieval Jewish identity. That the tales are meant for an expressly Jewish audience (beyond the obvious fact that the fables were written in Hebrew) is made evident by the multiple references to Jewish culture: glorifying Carmel and Bethlehem, referencing Jewish law, and even a story in which a man attempts to teach a wolf the Hebrew alphabet.
Nakdan's tales are filled with characters who are uncertain or frightened of their surroundings, not knowing who to trust and to what degree. In order to illustrate the lesson at hand, Nakdan has the characters either use their wit or other strengths to survive, or fail at their respective goals in order to show the wrong way to go about something. An example of the use of cunning is found in "Starling & Princess" in which a starling is trapped by a princess and kept in a cage to entertain and please the bird's human keepers. The bird has learned the language of the humans, and when he spies a good knight passing by his prison, he begs the knight to perform a favor: while the knight is away (presumably on Crusade in the Holy Land), if he sees another bird like the captured starling, he is to ask the other bird how the starling might escape his condition of imprisonment. The knight complies; while away, he meets another starling and asks the bird how the other might escape captivity. The bird, upon hearing this greeting, falls from the sky like a stone. The knight cannot revive this fallen bird, and after "sprinkl[ing] fresh water upon his face" (Hadas, 129), he merely tosses the lifeless bird away. Upon returning to the home where the first starling is held prison, the knight recounts this strange interaction to the captive bird. The starling takes note of his brethren's behavior and one day seemingly falls dead, setting the princess into a rage at the discovery that her novelty no longer serves her entertainment desires. She, as did the knight with the foreign bird, tosses her pet in the trash and forgets all about him. The starling is now free of his bars, and flies off to be as he once was.
The first parable that Nakdan offers at the end of this tale,
A man filled with wisdom and knowledge hath a seeing eye and an attentive ear. He hears what men say abroad, and his eyeballs look straight before him. Before others perceive his plans he is quick to begin and complete them, in give and take, in purchase and sale. Like the starling he will be diligent and prosper. He who reflects in his wisdom and proceeds accordingly, cometh forth from prison to reign (130),
is generic and can apply to any reader, offering only the lesson that one must be observant and diligent, and s/he shall prosper. However, the last line of Nakdan's "poesy"_"so the starling fell as one slain and won his life for his prize"_applies more specifically to the condition of the Jews of Nakdan's community, as well as elsewhere throughout medieval Europe.
If the reader understands the starling to be representative of a Jewish 'friend' or advisor to a Christian family or aristocracy, the story becomes one of advice in how to escape the prison of being beholden to Christian masters. The starling may be a forcefully or otherwise unwillingly acculturated Jew living in the service of Christian masters, performing for them his duties in order to appease them and save his life. His brethren in the Holy Land contacted by the good knight (either actual Palestinian Jews or Jews who are able, one or another, to live a more completely Jewish life) advise him to play dead_to die as a Jew_therefore allowing himself to be reborn in his true life as a Jew. The sprinkling of water on the foreheads of the two, presumed dead birds implies baptism. The birds fake death as Jews to be baptized and then pass under the radar of the Christians. These birds pretend to play along with the Christians' desires to convert them only so that they can be left alone. Whether or not this is Nakdan's intention_encouraging apparent apostasy in order to actually live as free Jews_is somewhat questionable as he seems to revile over-acculturation in other tales.
The starling met by the knight uses coded language to pass on his message to his entrapped brethren much the way Nakdan does in order to spread his message of how to survive in the Christian culture by eluding or fooling predatory Christian "wolves", and surviving as Jews within the climate of anti-Semitism. Nakdan knows that being a Jew in medieval Europe involved the constant need to battle off Christian attempts to convert or kill. He was also aware of the high level of acculturation taking places among some of the community. Throughout his tales, he reminds his readers of the virtues of Hebrew law, chastising bad Jews who have become proud or greedy. It is better, according to Nakdan, to avoid the pitfalls of a city mouse's riches offered by Christian and "secular" (in that anything in medieval Europe could be so called) lifestyles and accept the mild discomforts of the simple Jewish country mouse life true to the laws of the Torah.
He defends Jewish identity against the temptations of acculturation, as in the fable, "A Sick man, His Daughter, a Physician", in which a sick man trusts his daughter (the next generation) to protect his blood (heritage). The daughter accidentally loses the blood when a small animal tips over the vessel in which it was carried. This can be read as a small, unnoticed disturbance upsetting her Jewish identity, spilling out her inheritance and leaving an empty vessel to be filled with whatever she brings to it. When the daughter substitutes her own blood for that which spills out of the vessel, it is revealed that she is pregnant. She has transgressed from the law, and become "a door" (148) through which may pass any culture or lifestyle rather than a wall that will hold up over time and protect the cultural contents within. He has revealed her transgression in her attempt to cover up her carelessness in guarding her heritage.
These three texts_the reports of the Barcelona Disputation, the anonymous "S" Narrative, and Berechiah ha-Nakdan's Fox Fables_reveal the anxieties of the authors and their communities: apostasy, slaughter, and the loss of culture through complete assimilation into Christian society. All of the texts show a dialogue with Christian culture, either through direct reply as in Moses ben Nachman's report of the Barcelona Disputation, stylistic choices and implicit cultural values and norms as in the tropes used in the "S" Narrative, or in warnings of over-assimilation or misplaced trust in Christians as in the Fox Fables. The trauma experienced by the Jewish communities at the hands of Christians is seen in all of the texts: Pablo Christiani sides with the murderers of his family and desperately seeks meaning, the survivors of the Crusade discussed in the "S" Narrative live on to question their own value in faith, and Nakdan reveals a constantly felt need to defend and strengthen his community, much like Moses ben Nachman, as well as to advise his community on how to escape from the pressures and constant threats that come with the marginal status of Jews in Europe.
These texts negotiate, via these means, the meaning of Jewish identity in medieval Christian Europe. To be Jewish meant to be the bearer of a great burden. Like Abraham and the martyrs of the faith before and after, medieval Jews must struggle to survive in the face of imminent danger and spiritual threats. The massacres and persecutions of the past and present, and the forever present threat of those to come, shaped the Jewish psyche. Trauma bookends the Jewish experience in medieval Europe: that experienced in surviving the past and that which is formed by the struggle to survive in the present. Identity is a crisis that is constantly negotiated. The literature examined here played a key role in this struggle to create and maintain that identity.






Bibliography and Works Cited

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