Those familiar with sources from medieval Christian Europe will not be surprised that some Christians converted to Judaism. The Hebrew chronicles of the Crusades include glimpses and allusions to them, and many papal letters and bulls express anxiety over Jewish-Christian proximity and the resulting conversions. But aside from a handful of articles about such conversions in the premodern periods, there is no systematic monograph on the subject. Paola Tartakoff's book seeks to fill this lacuna, exploring a variety of sources—legal and literary—from across Europe—north and south—and across centuries.

Tartakoff disentangles conversions of those she calls “born Christians” from Jews who had converted to Christianity and decided to return to the fold. Jews considered these two types of conversion as different acts and processes—giyyur for the conversion to Judaism and ḥazarah bi-teshuvah for return to the fold. For Christians these were not distinct; they represented a rejection of Christianity—an apostasy. But these two conversions were sometimes intertwined.

To tie different geographies, chronologies, and themes together, Tartakoff frames the book around “the Norwich circumcision case,” in which several Norwich Jews were accused in 1234 of having circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy, named Edward, four years prior. This became a protracted trial that ended in 1240 with the execution of three of the accused Jews and expulsion of several others. This was likely, as Sara Lipton has suggested, a case of a child of a Jewish convert to Christianity, perhaps in a custody battle, whom Jews may have been trying to bring back into the community by “making him a Jew.” The accusation was apparently first considered in a royal court before being transferred to an ecclesiastical court. One of the beneficiaries of the Jews’ conviction was the child's father, Benedict, who received a part of the confiscated property.

The Norwich circumcision case is a puzzle. Tartakoff seeks to unpack the story by locating it “in contemporary anti-Jewish discourse” and the “thirteenth-century trend of prosecuting Jews on charges of having preyed on a Christian boy” (5–6). While there was no effort during court proceedings to connect Edward's supposed circumcision with anti-Jewish murder libels, which had emerged in the twelfth century in England (indeed, in Norwich itself) and began to spread across the continent in the thirteenth century, this link would be made some years later in a chronicle by Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk at St. Alban's (d. 1259). What remains puzzling is that neither the surviving court records nor Matthew Paris's chronicle evoke the story of William of Norwich, whose death in 1144 led to the rise, decades later, of the first anti-Jewish narrative of murder libel, with even a shrine apparently established in the town. Instead, in the court documents Edward is likened to St. Giles (51). This deafening silence about William of Norwich, unaddressed by Tartakoff, suggests that perhaps William's story was already forgotten, but more importantly, that Edward's reported circumcision was not seen through the lens of these early anti-Jewish libels.

Tartakoff's reading of the case seems forced, even anachronistic. For example, discussing a small knife said to have been used in Edward's supposed circumcision, Tartakoff notes that “these implements figured prominently in host desecration and ritual murder narratives” (56). A similar point is made about a Christian woman, Matilda, who reportedly rescued Edward. She played, Tartakoff claims, “roles familiar from tales of ritual murder and host desecration” (57). But by 1234, the date of the court summary, or even 1240, the date of the execution, aside from the apparently lost narrative of William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, there was no developed anti-Jewish discourse that could have colored the lens through which Edward's case would have been seen. Host desecration stories emerged later in the thirteenth century, and murder libels would become much more entrenched in European and English imagination only after “the Norwich circumcision case.” Indeed, in 1235 Fulda or in 1247 Valréas on the continent, both of which left a legal trail, the discourse is not yet defined. However, the death of Little Hugh of Lincoln in 1255 seems to have influenced the production of anti-Jewish narratives in England.

For Tartakoff, the Norwich circumcision case “illustrat[es] how literary trends could frame the interpretation of actual Jewish behavior” and “showcase[s] the Christian view of circumcision as a vicious form of Jewish attack, such that conversion to Judaism—like ritual murder, host desecration, and poisoning—involved injuring Christian bodies” (68). This is certainly the case for the later anti-Jewish libels, but it is unconvincing and anachronistic to claim so for Edward's story. A methodical—chronologically and geographically disciplined—discussion of anti-Jewish discourse before 1230, the year in which Edward was supposedly circumcised, would have illuminated the circulation of anti-Jewish ideas and laws in medieval Europe, and the local cultural and political conditions behind them. Sara Lipton has done so for anti-Jewish iconography, dating its emergence to the late twelfth century and documenting its transformations thereafter. But, as Lipton noted, “the circumcision was a rare subject in medieval art, though it began to be more popular in the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century.”Footnote ¹ That later interest in Jesus's circumcision seems to influence subsequent Christian narratives of murder libels against Jews, but this cannot be said about Edward.

Placing Edward's story in later narratives or depictions is not only anachronistic but sometimes perilous, as it blurs the history of actual Christian conversions to Judaism, which for males involved circumcision, and anti-Jewish libels that were products of Christian imagination. In closing chapter 2, Tartakoff states: “Both alleged offenses reflected and reinforced Christian stereotypes of contemporary Jews as bloodthirsty and depraved, and both could specifically involve circumcision. Finally, both led to a type of death. Ritual murders ended their victims’ earthly lives. Conversions to Judaism doomed their subjects’ eternal souls” (69). But there were no “ritual murders”—a phrase we should all abandon, and the true victims of those accusations were Jews. The rhetorical flourish deployed should be a warning: careless writing by scholars can be potentially dangerous and subject to misinterpretation.

What is missing from the analysis of this vexing case is the explanation of the local legal and political context. What happened over the ten years between the alleged circumcision and the execution in 1240? Why was the case moved from a royal to an ecclesiastical court? What is the political context? What does the final sentence tell us about the criminal charge itself? Was the sentence issued by the ecclesiastical court? What happened during the attacks on Norwich Jews in 1235 and 1238? Sara Lipton's essay on the now-notorious doodle on tax rolls from 1233 showing three prominent Norwich Jews, some of whom were also embroiled in Edward's circumcision, explores the political dynamics and relations between the crown, the town, and the place Jews occupied in that political struggle. Not addressing these questions and privileging the larger context of European anti-Jewish discourse leaves the case an unsolved puzzle.

The Norwich story—instead of binding Tartakoff's book together—throws it into chaos, shattering what could have been a compelling, chronologically and geographically expansive history of conversions of Christians to Judaism in medieval Europe into disconnected fragments. The reader is left to put the pieces together, sometimes wondering how fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Iberia helps us understand what happened in Norwich in the 1230s (e.g., n. 68 on p. 137, or the 1316 story of Johana, scattered around different chapters).

Some of these problems could have been remedied by careful editing—referring readers repeatedly back to other chapters is a telltale of serious structural problems. Editing would have caught repeated, sometimes even verbatim, phrases (e.g., pp. 21, 82, and 85, et al.), puzzling contradictions (e.g., p. 39 vs. p. 48), or the instances of dangerous wording. The book has a lot of fascinating material. But it is lost in the chaos caused by the Norwich circumcision case.