new ideas were popularized in art and in feasts and cults such as those of the martyred Anglo-Saxon princes and the Holy Innocents. They were also communi-cated in images of the Virgin and child and in sermons.
70This new ideology emphasized the dangers to the soul as well as the body of infanticide and child neglect and insinuated into people's minds the idea that their children were gifts from God and not possessions to do with as they pleased. These developments would have increased the guilt and anxiety over the deaths of children especially in communities such as Norwich that were already experiencing a good deal of tension and stress. There was a gap for Christians between the ideology of childhood and the reality of actual children's lives and deaths, but the very existence of the ideology expressed in so many forms put new ideas in people's minds, ideas that brought new fears and guilt about the commonplace occurrence
68 Mary Martin McLaughlin "Survivors and Surrogates," 121.
69 Barbara Kellum, "Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages," 373; see also "Changing Concepts of Infanticide in Medieval English Texts" by Marilyn Sandidge in the present volume.
70 Mary Martin McLaughlin "Survivors and Surrogates," 132-135.
of childhood death—a reality at odds with the ideals of a Christian society. But what about the reality and ideals of the Jewish community?
The Jewish ideal was that of a tight-knit community united in faith, living according to the laws of their religion, ever mindful of their identity as God's chosen people. In reality, they lived in small, scattered communities struggling to survive within a hostile group with a different faith, different rituals, and different cultural assumptions and behaviors.71 The Jews in England were doubly isolated because of their close association with the French-speaking Norman aristocracy.
Most Jews were poor, but "all were bound together by their religion and their condition and none had any other purpose in England than to subserve the interests of the king and the rulers in Church and State."72 The tensions felt by Jews in smaller urban areas such as Norwich, somewhat removed from the immediate protection of the king and rife with tensions of its own, must have been enormous.
It is as difficult to get at Jewish family values during this period as it is to understand such Christian values as they played out in day-to-day life. We can, however, look at some attitudes toward children within the Jewish community.
Rokeah uses legal sources, particularly the eyre rolls, for information in her article on unnatural child death in medieval England. With regard to Jewish children she states that:
I have not found cases in these records of Jews being involved with the death of children from fire, from scalding, through overlaying, or from animals. Nor, with the possible exception of the drowned Sampson son of Josceus, do I know of any case where in a Jew was associated with the accidental death of a Jewish child.73
It is hard to believe that the Jewish children in medieval England were completely protected from the common dangers of the time, nevertheless, it is equally implausible that, given the emotional atmosphere at the time, had there been any evidence at all for the involvement of Jewish parents in the unnatural deaths of their children there wouldn't have been accusations and official records of court proceedings or ecclesiastical investigations.
Rokeah cites evidence that demonstrates that emotional bonds within Jewish families were extremely strong.74 These bonds would have been made even stronger by the dangers these isolated families faced from the hostile Christian
71 Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, "The Northern European Jewish Community and its Ideal," 1969,218, and H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry Under Angevin Kings (London: Methuen, 1960), 5.
7 2 Ibid., 5.
7 3 Zefirah Entin Rokeah "Unnatural Child Death," 205.
7 4 Ibid., 205.
communities in which they lived. She also finds that Jewish parents had a deep commitment to their children's development in all areas of life as they were, according to Jewish law and tradition, "obligated to provide for their children's physical, educational, vocational, and emotional needs."75 According to Jewish sources, the parents were also responsible for developing the child's character beginning this task when the child was about three or four.76 Rokeah concludes that "the Jews of 'the Island'. . . despite all the contemporary allegations about their propensity to torture and crucify Christian boys, acted in the light of Jewish law and tradition toward their own children—unlike. . . too many of their Christian neighbors towards theirs."77
Ephraim Kanarfogel cites Aries' description of a medieval Christian household as the antithesis of the nuclear family with many different people living in the house exposing the children to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse as well as bad behavior and immodesty. According to Kanarfogal, "intuitively, medieval Jewish historians would argue that the observance of normative Jewish law by a significant portion of the Jewish population would preclude these abuses."78 The effective normativity of Jewish law was a result of the history of the Jews and the enduring influence of their law and religion. In twelfth-century England, on the other hand, Christianity still had not quite driven out the last vestiges of paganism.
The fact that William's grandfather had a reputation as a dream interpreter indicates that some of the lower clergy were still performing functions of their pre-Christian counterparts and perhaps they, and their peasant clients, were closer to the remnants of an older popular religion than anything the church in Rome would recognize as orthodox Christianity.
Nevertheless, over generations of gradual conversion Christians had been shaken loose from the structure of their pre-Christian spirituality and morality, while at the same time being only vaguely aware of the new structure of Christian moral law. This ambiguous state may account for at least some of what appear to be immoral, or amoral, treatment of Christian children. For the Jews, on the other hand, their ancient law and religious precepts were the only cons tant and enduring elements in their history as well as in their lives. Such ingrained elements were powerful influences on all aspects of Jewish behavior in ways to which Christianity could as yet only aspire. We have no sources to tell us specifically how
7 5 Ibid., 205.
7 6 Ephraim Kanarfogel, "Attitudes Toward Childhood and Children in Medieval Jewish Society,"
Appproaches to Judaism in Medieval Times(Chico: CA, Scholars Press, 1985): 1-24; here 5.
7 7 Rokeah, "Unnatural Child Death," 206.
7 8 Ephraim Kanarfogel, "Attitudes Toward," 6.
the Christian community felt about the strong emotional ties between Jewish parents and their children when the Christians themselves could not seem to live up to their own religious precepts regarding the treatment of their children. If the Christians were aware of these familial bonds and resented them it is possible that the ritual murder and blood libel accusations might in some small part spring from such resentments.
Karnarfogel finds that raising children was, to Jewish parents, a basically happy experience and that these parents recognized that a child's, even an older child's, nature is distinct from that of an adult. Following on this conclusion, he states that there is "the strong impression that Jewish children were on the whole simply treated in a manner far superior to their Christian counterparts."79 If this 'strong impression' was evident to the Christians of the medieval communities where people of the two faiths lived side by side, then it is probable that Christians had some emotional response to this impression. It may have been guilt, or jealousy, or simply suspicion and anxiety over the fact that another group of people could have such a different approach to child-rearing, one of the most basic of human activities.
It must not be forgotten, however, that there were undoubtedly many Christian families with strong emotional bonds who treated their children with love and care. It is perhaps only under stress such as poverty or radical change, as in Norwich, that Christians mistreated, neglected, or even murdered their offspring.
Nevertheless, the position that children hold in any society as representing both the weakness and vulnerability of that society as well as its survival, might make differences in the way children are treated a point of tension between groups.
There is one Jewish ritual concerning education that has some bearing on tensions between Jews and Christians over children and ritual murder accusations.
This ritual is described by Ivan G. Marcus in his book, Rituals of Childhood, Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe.60 Marcus presents this ritual as a phenomenon of the northern European or Ashkenazic Jewry and their attempt to maintain what he calls their "unequivocal Jewish identity" in the midst of the dominant Christian culture. The result is described as an "inward acculturation" wherein:
. . . the writings of the articulate few of the customs of the ordinary many sometimes expressed elements of their Jewish religious cultural identity by internalizing and transforming various genres, motifs, terms, institutions, or rituals of the majority culture in a polemical, parodic, or neutralized manner... it is not a question of Jewish
79 Ibid., 9.
80
Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
thinkers or groups adopting Christian patterns of behavior with the result that they somehow became less Jewish and more like the Christian majority. Only by converting did that happen. Rather, they managed to act out and reconstitute those combinations of Jewish and Christian traditions to fashion a parody and counter ritual as a social polemic against the truth claims of the majority culture.81
The ritual in question here is that of the small child being taken from his home to go to school for the first time. No such ritual existed in ancient Judaism or in Sephardic Jewry: this is an invention and adaptation of the medieval Ashkenaz;
those Jews who lived in Germany, northern France, and England. The ritual itself takes place when the young boy is five or six years old.82 On the morning of the festival of Shavuot, or Pentecost, the boy is taken from his mother, wrapped completely in a coat or prayer shawl and carried through the streets to his teacher where he is given a tablet on which the Hebrew alphabet has been written. The letters are covered with honey and the child is told to lick the honey off. Special cakes baked by virgins with Bible verses on them and eggs with verses on them as well are given to the boy to eat after he has successfully repeated the verses as his teacher read them to him. After further instruction, the teacher takes him to the riverbank where the child is told that, like the rushing river, his Torah study will never end. Although Marcus does not refer to an English enactment of this ritual, he does cite a version from the Mahzor Vitry from northern France and, as the Jews in England came directly from northern France, it is plausible to speculate that this ritual was performed by the Jews in Norwich and Lincoln.
This ritual had multiple layers of meaning, several of which are pertinent to this study. The part of this rite that takes place in the public space of the Christian world is particularly significant. First, the child is taken from his mother to join the older boys and the men in the traditional pursuit of Jewish males, Torah study.
The mother is a passive almost invisible figure who plays no part in her son's transition to the next phase of his life. She remains at home with the little ones.
This is a completely different picture of motherhood than that presented by the ritual murder accusation myths where the participation of the mother is crucial to the import of the story. The ritual murder stories, wherein the father has no role whatsoever, highlight the strength of the influence of the Madonna and child on medieval Christian society. By contrast, the role of the father is prominent in the Jewish ritual. Another element is added to the Jewish ritual: the teacher. The child is transferred from father to teacher in a symbolic gesture marking a new stage in
8 1 Ibid., 11-12.
8 2 The description of the ritual is from Ephraim Kanarfogel, "Attitudes Toward and Childhood," 1.
the child's life. In the Christian world there is no such rite and children pass into apprenticeship or fosterage seemingly without any community interest or involvement.
The child is wrapped in a coat or prayer shawl and carried through the streets.
The child must be completely covered because "ritual purity is required for the techniques to be effective, and achieving and maintaining purity is an integral part of the children's initiation ceremony... the child is wrapped in a garment so that he cannot see certain objects—a dog, an ass, a gentile, a pig—which confer impurity on sight."83 It may be suggested here that the story of the man who, years after William's death, confessed to having felt a body in the 'sack' or covering the Jews were carrying through Norwich in their alleged search for a burial place, may be a Christian interpretation of this ritual. The Christian man may have been trying to make sense of the strange behavior of these new and alien folk by feeling what was under the covering while, presumably, asking them what they were doing. The Jews may have told him they were taking a boy to school or given some such logical, simple explanation that set the man's fears at rest until long after when the popular story of St. William made him doubt the explanation that he had clearly accepted at the time.
Careful ritual maintenance of the child's purity here contrasts greatly with the assumed natural purity of the Christian child discussed above. According to Marcus, the child is pure by definition "because of the association of the pure child with the law of sacrifices, or purities."84 In fact, he says that this idea of the pure child makes its way into Christian monastic culture "by playing on the words puer (young boy) and puritas (purity).85 Marcus states that the ancient idea of initiation into wisdom and the fear of pollution associated with it, particularly when the child is being carried through the street of the dominant Christian community, inspired the requirement that the child be covered as a protection from polluting elements. The carrying of the child through the streets symbolized the Israelites leaving their home in Egypt and traveling through the dangerous wilderness to Sinai, but to the Christians it would have been strange, suspicious, and even frightening. By means of this journey through the streets, the child is integrated into the Jewish community and, as Marcus says, "the child embodies biblical Israel and contemporary medieval Jewry from a Jewish point of view."86 In like fashion it can be said that images of the tortured, lifeless bodies of children, like William,
83 Ibid., 69.
8 4 Ibid., 70.
8 5 Ibid., 70.
8 6 Ibid., 80-81.
who are the victims in stories of ritual murder are meant to integrate the defining moment in Christian biblical history, the sacrifice of Christ, and the contemporary fears and anxieties of the Christian community.
The purity of the child in this Jewish ritual is associated with sacrifice through the complexities of Torah readings and Jewish history and tradition.87 The child who studies Torah is a sacrifice that redeems the entire community and provides a vicarious atonement for the Jewish people.88 This idea of child as sacrifice is peculiar to the medieval Ashkenaz and Marcus posits that it developed in opposition to the increasing importance of the Christian doctrine that associated the Eucharist with the Christ child.89 The kind of intellectual sacrifice as it plays out in the Ashkenazic ritual contrasts strongly with the blood and violence that marks visions of the Eucharistie Host.
Another sacrifice with which the Jewish ritual is compared is that of monastic oblation, the practice of giving children to monasteries at an early age.90 These Christian children were donated to the monasteries for various reasons sometimes having to do with parental atonement for sins and, once there, they were expected to participate fully, like adults, in the difficult monastic life. Beginning in the late eleventh- and early twelfth-centuries, the church began to have doubts about this practice.91 For monastic authors of the early medieval period, childhood and the monastic state had obvious similarities: the monks were meant to achieve the purity, innocence, and simplicity of a young child.92
In her article "The Influence of Monastic Ideals on Carolingian Concepts of Childhood" in this volume, Valerie L. Garver points out that, prior to the twelfth century, rather than monastics being encouraged to model themselves on children, people were encouraged to raise their children in accordance with monastic ideals.
The changing ideas of the twelfth century, however, led churchmen to begin to require that children be of an age to understand, and agree to take on, the rigors of the religious life. By the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-centuries boys under twelve were no longer accepted as monastic initiates and, by about the same time, the Jewish school initiation rite began to be replaced by the newly developed bar
8 7 For a full discussion of these associations see Ivan G. Maicus,Rituals of Childhood 1996, 94-101.
8 8 Ibid., 94.
8 9 Ibid., 100-101.
9 0 Ibid., 17.
91
Mary Martin McLaughlin "Survivors and Surrogates," 129.
9 2 Mayke De Jong, In Samuel's Image, Child Oblation in the Early Mediei'al West. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 12 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1996), 132.
mitzvah.93 The sacrifice of the child to the Torah or the monastic life now required the awareness and willingness on the part of the child in both societies.
The idea of sacrifice both with regard to the Jewish rite and to the Eucharist has bearing on the development of the ritual murder myth. In the case of William, his construction as an innocent young child allows him to be seen as a sacrifice of atonement for the Saxon community of Norwich that overcame whatever sins may have brought the Norman oppressors and their Jewish servants down upon them.
The boy's sacrifice provided the opportunity for the divided Christian communi-ties to be at one with each other. Hugh and the other ritual murder victims can also be seen as sacrifices. In these cases the sacrifices may have been for the sake of the unity and purity of a Christendom that was seen as polluted by the presence of Jews within its precincts. Certainly the ritual murder accusation contributed to the eventual expulsion of Jews from most of northern Europe.
The boy's sacrifice provided the opportunity for the divided Christian communi-ties to be at one with each other. Hugh and the other ritual murder victims can also be seen as sacrifices. In these cases the sacrifices may have been for the sake of the unity and purity of a Christendom that was seen as polluted by the presence of Jews within its precincts. Certainly the ritual murder accusation contributed to the eventual expulsion of Jews from most of northern Europe.